AfterDawn.com: User profiles: Electronic Freedom and Access for ALL citizens of planet Earth

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Efreedom (12 Feb 2008 19:18)
I have a feeling if people can't download what they want, then they will soon decide they don't really need an internet connection.
Then it will be the big internet providers that will wish they had never got involved with this Stalinist Government.
varnull (12 Feb 2008 21:28)
attempted post on the bbc news talkback system for your enjoyment..

Once I can download full quality music and films legally free from any DRM rubbish I will do so. Currently as a licence payer I am rather amgry that my failure to BUY a commercial product from either microsoft or apple which supports the BBC DRM filled IPlayer I am excluded from accessing something which I have been FORCED to pay for. I can't honestly remember the last time I watched any BBC tv channels because the reception in my particular corner of the country is very poor, and below watchable.. Yet I still have to pay for a TV licence.. for a service I am denied (though most of the independent, advertising supported free to air channels work just fine thankyou)..

It happens that I was unable to visit with friends last evening and missed the wonderful David Attenborough show, which I was looking forward to all week.. So as a linux user I put this to you.. what choice are you giving me to watch something I HAVE PAID TO SEE! Piracy, that's what.. plain and simple.
DRM forces people into piracy, and compulsory subscription creates angry and non trusting subscribers.
It's time for all the media companies to get with the program.. and that program is called sopcast and vuze.. free media at full quality paid for by advertising, free from DRM and watermarking.. because who will steal what is free anyway? and does it matter if they do??

I declare this article free under the creative commons.. which means it is free to quote, take, copy, store, sell or do whatever the hell you want with it in any fashion and using any technology existing or not even invented without fear of censorship or reprisals now or at any time either in the past or in the future
ktulu14 (13 Feb 2008 14:17)
sweet post, did you get it on the site? eloquent as ever, not the bull in a china shop response i would have laid out.

I have to agree with you about the iplayer, I am a forced license payer, rarely watch bbc programs (exception being Top Gear) but as yet I have not felt the need to go to the Iplayer to "catch up" on what I haven't really missed. If I ever feel the need to sit and watch Universtity Challenge (pretentious claptrap) then I will hunt for it through the torrents until I get it. I have paid once to watch it (and didn't), so I will not pay again (for a proprietary OS) to watch it again.
Efreedom (15 Feb 2008 5:35)
It is so terribly depressing travelling through the bloggosphere and visiting places on the Internet. So many ideas, so many discussions, so much talk! Yet everything sooner or later disappears as if through a black hole or gets drowned in the babel of voices struggling to be heard (including this one!). There is nothing left. No light! Most of us remain if not as ignorant, at least as impotent in the face of the challenges and threats we face today and those we will be facing tomorrow, as when we first embarked on this "electronic" search for a better world. Blogging, as it is presently, is indeed a very passive activity but it has a dark side to it also in that it lulls us into a false sense of comfort and satisfaction. I am thinking that perhaps there is a need for more "active" blogging. Not that discussion and pondering and ranting are no longer useful and should be thrown on the scrap heap. What if along with all that there was also sharing of the concrete actions that one is taking in one's own particular life for the advancement of a better world. For example, along with ranting against the big bad US invading Iraq for oil, why not also add what one is doing PERSONALLY to reduce one's own oil consumption - SUV or hybrid? What group have we joined and what concrete steps is it taking for a better world? How can others join? I fear that unless we learn of creative ways - or share them if we already have them - to transform today's "echo chambers" (which is what the Internet and the bloggosphere for the most part have become) into some kind of "launching pads" towards real activism in the real world, we will remain trapped with each other, albeit in a "wonderful world of intelligent discourse", talking to each other, across each other, about what we should be doing or what we should be thinking, instead of going out there and really tackling the problems. It would be interesting, for example, to have on this site maybe a listing (or links to listings) of TRUE activism (community, grassroots) instead of COUNTERFEIT activism (corporate-backed or government-backed activism disguised as the former !). In other words, action (and ideas always of course!) but not just talk. Talk is cheap! We can't afford it anymore!
varnull (15 Feb 2008 6:23)
The hour is too late for the sort of commentary I would normally offer. For now, let me just state that there will never be a free world in the absence of free children, who are able to learn and develop optimally. Freedom, liberty, autonomy, and responsibility are learned and they are only possible if one's mind is free. As long as schooling is substituted for authentic educational opportunity and as long as schooling is mandated by laws, children will be, in effect, "brainwashed" or indoctrinated by the state and rendered inept by the school bureaucracy. I will attach a list that I wrote months ago. It spells out my specific objections in some detail.
The ancient premises and promises on which compulsory school attendance is predicated are ALL patently false. No one can come up with a single justification past or present for this travesty against children that will fly for a single second. The following briefly summarizes a number of specific issues or arguments relative to these questions, each of which will be more thoroughly discussed in separate articles of this series.
1. To function adequately as responsible and mature adult citizens in a free democratic system, people must necessarily first experience real personal choices, real freedom and liberty in their purest form, and extensive real opportunities to practice and experiment with their own decision-making skills and discretionary abilities throughout their childhood. Having freedom for the first time at graduation is like being given a 747 to fly, without ever having been near one.
2. Schooling that is forced upon students cannot possibly be seen by them as a privilege and an honor, nor can it ever result in authentic education. A privilege by any sane or logical definition involves initiative, free will, self-determination, personal goals and objectives, and independence from mass conformity and manipulation. The same is true in spades for an �education�. No credible definition of education includes subjugation, dependence, confinement, the memorization of trite and trivial factual material (for the sole purpose of passing tests), massive standardization, bureaucratic gridlock, and the endless confusion of behavioral demands and discipline with academic discipline and excellence.
3. Values, morals, principles and ethics cannot ever be integrated in whole or in part into an official institutional curriculum or transmitted from a public school teacher to a diverse and variegated group of children, without stepping into the territory forbidden by the church-state separation requirement of the US Constitution. To try to create a middle ground or a watered down version of values and morals satisfactory for mass consumption is to render them meaningless and impotent. A choice has to be made between education and indoctrination. It is impossible to contribute significantly to positive character formation, without super-imposing essentially philosophical or religious viewpoints or without purposefully exercising undue bias in social or political influence. An institution of this nature must be totally free of any state or other external domination or control of any kind.
4. The popular and controlling conception of knowledge as information, data or subject matter, that can exist in some tangible form external to a human being, and that can be somehow transplanted, transferred or injected into a student�s brain or mind through an �educational� process is in direct contradiction to any credible contemporary psychological theory. This view of knowledge and learning is anachronistic and misanthropic in the extreme. Knowledge (knowing) can only exist when it is part of an integrated whole within a living person�s brain and nervous system. Knowledge must be methodically and voluntarily extracted and extrapolated from accessible sources by a living, breathing, and fully engaged student. This misguided mass and indiscriminate immersion in and exposure to information, presented arbitrarily and in uniformity is by definition something other than education. Education originates with the intrinsic desire of the individual to expand upon and incorporate what only that individual can perceive and recognize (re-cognize) in her or his personal phenomenological field. This is not Pollyanna theory. It is demonstrable fact.
5. A state government invariably wields overwhelming power with respect to private individuals. When school authorities usurp the responsibility of parents to educate their children, those authorities are automatically obliged to define both legally and practically the parameters of education in the process as an agent of government. They also automatically establish a need at all levels to assure compliance, loyalty, tacit acceptance, legitimacy, surrender and servility on the part of children and parents. They must sell what they offer and it must continually justify their use of power and its ineffectiveness. This effort then necessarily becomes nothing more than naked propaganda, pandering, mind-control, rationalization, PR, indoctrination, subtle and not-so-subtle persuasion, intimidation of parent and child, Blaming The Victim, nostalgia baiting, outright lying and everything else, but education.
6. The belief that it is possible to pre-ordain a set curriculum that applies uniformly to large numbers of succeeding classes of students is absolute folly. Curriculum is the list of wonderful and specific intentions, emanating from pretentious or presumptuous scholars, with which the road to hell is paved. A curriculum sets in concrete things that are never, ever the same for two students or teachers; things that are fluid and changing by definition, and things that are always contingent on exponentially varying experience and perception. Curriculum, beyond the level of a single teacher on a single day, is a stone that weighs around the necks of teachers and students alike, sinking all of them into a non-navigable sea of slime.
7. When we try to do the impossible and especially the impossible on a grand state or national scale, we cannot help but misallocate resources, misdirect our time and energies, and make major mistakes in policy and practice. This is nowhere more evident than in the profound neglect in schools of the verified needs of students for constant physical movement and exercise; for occasional peaceful tranquility; for diversion, variety and stimulation; for artistic experience and exposure; for quiet solitude and contemplation; for vigorous social interaction and identity formation, and for the manipulation and exploration of objects and ideas involving unlimited spatial and mental configurations. Schools must concentrate on �academics� at the expense of everything else and at the expense of the child�s welfare, since academics are their alleged over-arching purpose. Unfortunately, however, even academics are doomed to failure under the conditions of coercion and exploitation in these highly contrived, confusing and sterile environments.
8. The relationship of children to their parents and guardians is as close to a sacred trust as anything gets in the estimation of most American citizens. But the quickest way to undermine and compromise that precious relationship is to arbitrarily make parents into tough truant officers for the state or for one of its bureaucratic agencies. The same thing can be said about making teachers the enforcers of anonymous authority, which in this scheme of things is unavoidable. A child might well voluntarily attend a school where the parent is intimately involved; where his or her perceptions, experiences and feelings are taken into serious consideration by the staff, and where the parent is able to articulate a sincere and convincing rationale that corresponds to the actual events and potential benefits that can be seen daily by the child. Given these state laws and the total disconnect they create however; parents are thereby pitted against their own children and alienated from them and their peers, often irreparably.
9. Children came to represent little more than a given number of dollars to a given locality the second the first law was passed requiring attendance in a school � any school. Incredible pressure is applied on parents, teachers and the children themselves to keep those seats occupied and the money flowing to the institution, regardless of the inimical effects on all concerned. Children have become chattel in such a system and are treated more as resources to use and property to control, than as important and fragile new members of the larger community.
10. If genuine educational opportunities were offered at no cost or at an affordable cost to parents, there would be no need to force any parent to enroll their children in such a beneficial and productive program, nor are there likely to be children who would not embrace their chance to receive the universally recognized benefits of such a splendid program, except in the most rare instances. Those few instances and exceptions that would occur in which parents are negligent are covered by existing child welfare laws. Children of all ages would be fighting to gain access to places where real learning was taking place and real opportunity for becoming productive and competent was evident.
11. Let�s ask ourselves, fifty years after the Civil Rights movement; after The Brown �separate and unequal� decision and the Cole Report and many Blue Ribbon studies; after major legislation aimed at ending hate crimes and discrimination of all types; after innumerable programs, both in schools and out, having to do with tolerance and �multi-culturalism� and justice and awareness, why are we seeing an increase in the terribly nasty and petty things of this nature that we had hoped were behind us? The clear answer is because we have been unable to do anything about the institutionally caused insecurity; the inherent barriers to the formation of a positive and affirmative identity; the incapacity for understanding and tolerance resulting from school methods and structures, and the irresponsible failure to properly inform and educate our youth with respect to our history, our mistakes and our discoveries. Children who are pushed into long-term schooling that they find degrading, demoralizing, frustrating, meaningless or oppressive, where they must compete for favor and attention, do not usually respond well to messages about tolerance or develop an appreciation for diversity, charity, brotherhood, fairness and sharing the wealth.
12. The idea that there is no better way and no affordable alternative is absurd. The idea that twelve years of formal schooling for 180 days per year is necessary is even more absurd. For thousands of years, if not generations, children learned what they needed to know in a fraction of the time, without schooling, forced or otherwise. �Basic skills� are still basic and sophistication still relies on the love of learning. Before forced or formal schooling the rate of literacy, even among the rural and poor was higher than it is today and there was a much greater respect and admiration for authentic learning and intellectual development.
13. Among the driving forces behind the establishment of laws requiring school attendance were and are still religious concepts that have no place in public policy. These disgraced and unsubstantiated �theories� conflict directly with many current religious beliefs and with solid scientific research results. The idea that the child will do the wrong thing or act in a selfish or �sinful� manner (the theory of original sin) without being dragged into a school and reprogrammed by right-thinking adults is the prime example of a terribly backward and ignorant notion, in what is becoming a terribly backward and ignorant nation as a direct consequence. Children compulsively seek knowledge, unless criminally discouraged and they return respect in proportion to the respect they receive.
14. The unrealistic popular hope for salvation or for a social panacea and a utopian future has historically been a prominent motivating factor in equating schooling with education and has brought nothing but grief and abject failure. If universal education is truly the means to a better tomorrow for mankind, as it most surely is, then the sooner we relinquish the foolish pipedream of fine-tuning this misanthropic misery machine of schooling throughout the period of youth, the sooner we will see a significant increase in authentic education. Society cannot be improved by regarding children as sub-human conscripts in need of brainwashing.
15. One frequently hears the explanation that school is preparation for life and that kids must experience the unpleasantries of work, study, punching a clock, taking orders and boring drudgery, in order to be better able to deal with these things later as adults. What hogwash this is! If life were like school, we would all commit suicide long before we reached adulthood. Young people are not better prepared by being made to feel imposed upon; by feeling like victims of injustice and abuse; by comparing themselves to workers in a dead-end and unproductive factory, by having the sensations of worthless or insignificant prisoners of sadistic guards, or being treated as uniform cogs in a square wheel. Human beings all deserve better at all ages. One lives life; one doesn�t prepare for it!
16. The �state of the art� psychological conceptions of basic learning processes, multiple intelligences, moral and social development, supervision and intervention needs, methods and materials for mental improvement, etc., have all changed radically in recent decades with the advent of various technologies, sciences, tools and techniques. Yet, corresponding changes in how things are done in schools and in removing the shackles from children and their teachers are not even on the drawing board. Why is this? Because the law and the structures that it necessitates are all that are needed to discourage and defeat anyone who might try to take any substantial initiative in moving ideas and proposals from the temporary, limited and experimental to the permanent, expanded and applied.
17. �Schooling� and �learning�, and �system� and �education�, are terms that are primarily antithetical to each other � people do not learn well in groups or institutions, or with constant auditory input (lectures and speeches), unless the subject matter pertains directly to the group or to the group process and unless sessions are short, direct and highly stimulating. No system can accommodate the unpredictable and variable needs of large numbers of individual learners confined in space, mobility and scope of thought and vision. School, meaning the clustering of sizable numbers of children into a classroom, is bad for kids, except in extremely limited doses, with ample recovery time in between. The brain is NOT a passive computer and the child is not just an inert, disembodied brain.
18. Despite the wishes of many well-meaning teachers and school personnel, and despite the lip service paid by many official spokespersons, active and consistent parental participation is not actually desired in school, except in enforcing rules, affirming authority (including, or perhaps especially, the authority of officials and others over the parents themselves) supervising homework, and reinforcing the omnipresent messages of guilt, shame, intimidation, inferiority and the like. This is one other direct consequence of power and superiority invoked by the law. If school is required, appointed �experts� must assert their superiority over parents.
19. Much, if not most of current �educational� practice, as well as compulsory attendance in school itself, is founded on the highly antiquated but pervasive perception of the child as a blank slate or an empty container to be filled via teaching, by a master in a given subject area or in pedantry. Recent studies, as well as settled and verified sciences reveal, however, that the child builds on a surprisingly sophisticated and complex cognitive foundation from birth. The active and exploratory nature of the child demand that the child not be inhibited and frustrated by an environment that is hostile to his or her enthusiasm, curiosity, competence and independence.
20. Americans have a very long tradition of rejecting any plan or system where the ends is alleged to justify the means. Yet, when it has come to children, that prohibition has somehow been rendered unimportant. The ends have never justified anything, let alone the mean means in schooling by fiat. The reasons why this is glossed over and denied habitually are several, primary of which is the facile ability of the schools to blame their victims for their own failures and the tendency of the victims to blame themselves. Resentment that has no logically explained cause and no accessible means of expression or visible target is turned inward. Compulsion in education (the means) is never justified by the ends, i.e., mis-education, indoctrination, programming, etc., since by definition, education requires liberty and autonomy as well as leadership and voluntary participation. This is not ivory tower theory. This is reality. Read the statistics and weep.
21. Authoritarian structures derive their existence from metaphors that are nearly universal within a culture. We have, for example the �strict father metaphor� which originates in the construction of the traditional family and which affects our institutions in a major way. While this metaphor has its utility within the typical family and has been functional to some extent historically in societies, it is not a sound basis for a state and national educational policy framework in today�s world. Authority in education must be based on daily-demonstrated competence, on valid and verifiable knowledge and on the ability to teach and inspire, without resistance. Arbitrary authority, especially when anonymous, engenders resistance, resentment, defiance, politicking, jealousy, favoritism, subversion, etc., etc., etc. Authoritative relationships are far superior to authoritarian relationships.
22. Schools that owe their existence or survival to a captive and largely unenthusiastic audience have a strong tendency to become progressively anti-intellectual. There are dozens of factors that contribute to this sorry result. One is the least common denominator effect, due to wide variation in interests, aptitudes and ability. Another is the fear factor, which inhibits teacher and student alike in their pursuit of knowledge and truth. The most significant factor however is that schooling by legislative decree is not about the intellect at all, since conduct, attitude, deportment and attendance must always take priority to ensure absolute conformity to the law.
23. Community is of extreme importance to the American way of life and schools have always been regarded as central to community life. Yet, schools which serve the state as factories to produce a quasi-human �product� for its own supposed purposes are inhospitable to the idea of community in many respects. Children and parents find no comfort there and are too often loathe to return there for any reason. Schools have found it necessary to consolidate and expand, due to budgets strained by waste, bureaucracy, corruption and excessive focus on accountability. The voracious and conscienceless bureaucracy meanwhile has little or no affinity for or loyalty to the local community. And, citizens leaving these schools are typically cynical and bereft of any genuine interest in their community or of confidence in their ability to speak on issues or to influence change. Twelve years of disengagement and powerlessness leaves them alienated and cynical.
24. The futility with respect to change and with respect to the effective application of proven scientific principles that characterizes �lower education� has infected �higher education� to a shocking degree. What we now see is merely �lower� schooling and �higher� schooling and mis-education at all levels. Teaching as a profession is no longer held in high regard. We see students who have not grown and who still find it extremely difficult to think or act independently, courageously or conscientiously, even long after they have graduated or dropped out. Even masters programs are more about being politically correct, spouting the party line as it is pronounced in selected texts and materials and conforming to the behavior and expectations of authority figures, than about the pursuit of knowledge and performing with dignity and conscience. Autonomy is a foreign concept in the typical university. Few college level students have a true love for discovery and research. The research that is performed is duly reported in thousands of journals, which are only read by a small handful of professionals, if they are read at all. Litigation is required to change the simplest things.
25. Attempting to force a child to learn is like trying to force a fish to swim. Nevertheless, we blindly go on about trying not only to superimpose our knowledge but also to measure and quantify how much we have force-fed our wards in these windowless prisons called schools. Grading and evaluation according to behavior and performance are absolutely indispensable, of course, as are the typical proportions of successes and failures in any competitive system. Likewise, all manner of other intrusions on the lives and minds of children are required, such as endless testing; intrusive homework; rushing about from class to class in rat-race fashion; rigidity in teacher responses and routines; restrictions and parameters set on everything, including discussion and debate, and bells, buzzers and whistles marking the beginning and end of all the things that should rightfully have continuity and connection. We have turned learning into drudgery and discouraging work for children who learned automatically prior to school.
26. Swimming might be an apt metaphor for learning (to continue with the aquatic metaphor). Once learned, aquatic activities can occur almost anywhere there is water, just as the more intellectual and academic processes can occur almost anywhere there is some source of information, with or without a classroom or teacher. But creating a law that requires school attendance, a curriculum, a particular set of standards and accountability rules, etc., is like freezing the water to some depth and trapping the victims in the ice or below the surface. Suddenly, there is a rigidified hierarchy with political and economic interests to protect. Suddenly, there is an adversarial relationship between the naturally hyperactive student and the institution and a need to promote the status quo and the interests and the perpetuation of the institution over the interests of the student. The ice can only get thicker and deeper, while the less hardy or competitive swimmers become frozen and die. And, even those with the most advantages develop a jaded and unbalanced view of the world.

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