tools of capitalism

I had the honor of talking with a class of students at the Arthur Morgan School recently.  (The Arthur Morgan School is a small, alternative middle school, located in the Celo Community in North Carolina.)
This class was studying political and religious ideologies and I spoke -- along with someone else -- about capitalism.  I had been asked to discuss a bit of the history of capitalism and I drew from Fernand Braudel's three-volume work on capitalism and material life, which made a strong impression on me when I read it years ago.

Braudel emphasizes that capitalism is not an economic system, and I underlined this concept by discussing the history of the tools of capitalism:

numbers and writing
bookkeeping
money and credit
forward financing
trade and banking

Also briefly discussed was the development of cities/city-states/and the rise of the nation-state by brief accounts of the 12th century Italian city-states, Venice, Amsterdam, and London (England).  The topic provoked lively discussion in class and outside among ourselves.

It is important to understand that capitalism uses one set of tools and that we now need another set of tools, on a political level, tools like the Green Party's Ten Key Values.  These tools enable citizens to start concentrating on what we can each do, on the local level, with our families and neighbors.

Indeed, the remarkable community and school in Celo are already using, in their small way, some of the tools many more people will need to use in the future.

Green Party Platform & homeschooling

There isn't much about education that inspires me lately from any party. And I noticed that homeschooling was not specifically mentioned in the available Green Party Platform (2004). I couldn't find another platform but perhaps one exists.

Anyway, it is a good chance for me to summarize reasons why homeschooling is a good thing for children, families and all citizens. So I am beginning a series of posts correlating homeschooling with Green Party Values.

lack of democracy in schools: strip searches

Today's NY Times has an article about a 13-year old girl who was stripped searched to see if she had prescription-strength ibuprofen pills on her. This is yet another example of the invasion of human rights we have grown to accept within institutions that are ostensibly social services. And the case shows the growing inability of citizens to view the limitations of the rights of children as a dangerous thing. No wonder: most citizens themselves have been raised within this system and see it as normal.

UPDATE: Supreme Court ruled against search

Schools in the 20th century rapidly grew more centralized and sought efficiencies of scale (see Decentralization, this blog). And, consequently, for over a hundred years, children have spent increasing amounts of time in authoritarian and undemocratic structures. The more small-scale social structures of the family and local communities have been battered and do not now support children or families as they live with this institution.

Generalizing from this fact, some thinkers feels it is no wonder we have trouble, as a country, staying out of wars since the advent of industrial factory schooling. We are patterned and overexposed to large groups that function without the freedoms that smaller groups will usually display. The very success of large industrial schooling is what needs changed and this is why "school reform" is so very hard to achieve.

Real school change must first identify what is wrong with the schools and what is wrong is an overall system design that was always an error but was mitigated in its effects.  Now the system itself needs change and homeschooling provides the grassroots knowledge for this change.  Homeschooling is a direct, citizen response to a failing system. 

Green Party Values & Homeschooling: Decentralization I

Homeschooling can be viewed as a form of decentralization of the educational factory system that has grown very concentrated. This centralization trend spans > 80 years as shown by the decreasing number of school districts within the US. Consolidation has continued unabated until the present day. Note that in 1930, the population was far smaller than the population today, 2009. Centralization has accompanied urbanization and now encompasses even rural districts once home to multi-age, one-room schoolhouses.

The creation of these large administrative units and the large schools they administer, has reduced effective parental and local control. It has created a policy emphasis on the physical infrastructure of the factory school system. The centralization tendency is actually even more pronounced since this chart does not show the remote control exercised by testing companies like ETS and College Board and the manufacturers of IQ tests. 

This massively centralized school structure is one foundation of the systematically inhumane and antidemocratic nature of schooling today. Widespread participation in this system has weakened individual initiative, dehumanized us and inured us to the steady erosion of our rights as citizens and human beings.

Homeschooling is school decentralized to the smallest unit, schooling in its most basic form. Homeschooling along with its mom-and-pop homegrown homeschooling businesses, co-ops and parent-to-parent services of all kinds represent a spontaneous decentralization of education activity. The system itself is too big and that very structure creates more problems than it solves. The Green Party tool of Decentralization is one of my favorite ways to understand homeschooling and the contributions it can make to discussions of "educational reform."