Education: The Difference Between Learning How to Think and What to Think

Professor of Law Butler Shaffer at the LewRockwell.com in the following excerpt, eloquently distinguishes between independent and conformist thinking [bold mine]

Education is an ongoing confrontation between those who want to help children learn how to think, and those who want to teach them what to think. While there are numerous variations on these themes, the contrast can most clearly be found in the distinctions between child-centered Montessori systems, and teacher- and test-centered schools. Government schools usually fall into the latter category. Homeschooling, religious schools, un-schooling, and other forms tend to emphasize either the "how" or the "what" in their efforts with children.

Those who focus on learning how to think have in mind helping children develop their own methods of questioning and analyzing the world around them; to control their own inquiries and opinions; to the end of helping children become independent, self-directed persons. The role of the teacher in such a setting is to provide new learning situations (e.g., open up new subjects of inquiry when the student is ready to do so) and to facilitate the processes of questioning so as to help the students get to deeper levels of understanding.

People who have developed the capacity for epistemological independence are not easy to control for purposes that do not serve their interests. Institutions – which have purposes of their own that transcend those of individuals – require a mass-minded population that has been conditioned to accept outer-imposed definitions of "reality." Any deviation from this systemic purpose – as would derive from students questioning how the arrangement would benefit them – would be fatal to all forms of institutionalism.

The established order has, from one culture and time period to another, insisted on educational systems that train young minds into what to think. "Truth" becomes a set of beliefs that conform to an institutional imperative, and it becomes the purpose of schools to inculcate such a mindset. Whereas "how to think" learning that finds its purpose and focus within the minds of self-directed, independent students, "what to think" education derives from outside the students’ experiences and analytical skills. As Ivan Illich so perceptively expressed it, "[s]chool is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

To this end, the established order has helped generate – with eager assistance from academia – a belief that all understanding is a quality requiring phalanxes of self-styled "experts" who, by virtue of their prescribed status, enjoy monopolies to offer opinions about their respective fields of study. Plato’s designation of "philosopher kings" has been sub-franchised into categories of "experts" to be found in "history," "physics," "psychology," "economics," "law," and seemingly endless sub-groupings that negate the role once respected for those who had received a "liberal arts" education.

Read the rest here.

Doug Casey: End of the Nation State

Investing guru, and anarchist philosopher Doug Casey believes that today’s nation states is on path to the dinosaur age

Mr. Casey writes at the Casey Research, (bold highlights mine)

Mankind has, so far, gone through three main stages of political organization since Day One, say 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern men started appearing. We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States.

Karl Marx had a lot of things wrong, especially his moral philosophy. But one of the acute observations he made was that the means of production are perhaps the most important determinant of how a society is structured. Based on that, so far in history, only two really important things have happened: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Everything else is just a footnote.

Let's see how these things relate.

The Agricultural Revolution and the End of Tribes

In prehistoric times, the largest political/economic group was the tribe. In that man is a social creature, it was natural enough to be loyal to the tribe. It made sense. Almost everyone in the tribe was genetically related, and the group was essential for mutual survival in the wilderness. That made them the totality of people that counted in a person's life – except for "others" from alien tribes, who were in competition for scarce resources and might want to kill you for good measure.

Tribes tend to be natural meritocracies, with the smartest and the strongest assuming leadership. But they're also natural democracies, small enough that everyone can have a say on important issues. Tribes are small enough that everybody knows everyone else, and knows what their weak and strong points are. Everyone falls into a niche of marginal advantage, doing what they do best, simply because that's necessary to survive. Bad actors are ostracized or fail to wake up, in a pool of their own blood, some morning. Tribes are socially constraining but, considering the many faults of human nature, a natural and useful form of organization in a society with primitive technology.

As people built their pool of capital and technology over many generations, however, populations grew. At the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, all over the world, there was a population explosion. People started living in towns and relying on agriculture as opposed to hunting and gathering. Large groups of people living together formed hierarchies, with a king of some description on top of the heap.

Those who adapted to the new agricultural technology and the new political structure accumulated the excess resources necessary for waging extended warfare against tribes still living at a subsistence level. The more evolved societies had the numbers and the weapons to completely triumph over the laggards. If you wanted to stay tribal, you'd better live in the middle of nowhere, someplace devoid of the resources others might want. Otherwise it was a sure thing that a nearby kingdom would enslave you and steal your property.

The Industrial Revolution and the End of Kingdoms

From around 12,000 B.C. to roughly the mid-1600s, the world's cultures were organized under strong men, ranging from petty lords to kings, pharaohs, or emperors.

It's odd, to me at least, how much the human animal seems to like the idea of monarchy. It's mythologized, especially in a medieval context, as a system with noble kings, fair princesses, and brave knights riding out of castles on a hill to right injustices. As my friend Rick Maybury likes to point out, quite accurately, the reality differs quite a bit from the myth. The king is rarely more than a successful thug, a Tony Soprano at best, or perhaps a little Stalin. The princess was an unbathed hag in a chastity belt, the knight a hired killer, and the shining castle on the hill the headquarters of a concentration camp, with plenty of dungeons for the politically incorrect.

With kingdoms, loyalties weren't so much to the "country" – a nebulous and arbitrary concept – but to the ruler. You were the subject of a king, first and foremost. Your linguistic, ethnic, religious, and other affiliations were secondary. It's strange how, when people think of the kingdom period of history, they think only in terms of what the ruling classes did and had. Even though, if you were born then, the chances were 98% you'd be a simple peasant who owned nothing, knew nothing beyond what his betters told him, and sent most of his surplus production to his rulers. But, again, the gradual accumulation of capital and knowledge made the next step possible: the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution and the End of the Nation-State

As the means of production changed, with the substitution of machines for muscle, the amount of wealth took a huge leap forward. The average man still might not have had much, but the possibility to do something other than beat the earth with a stick for his whole life opened up, largely as a result of the Renaissance.

Then the game changed totally with the American and French Revolutions. People no longer felt they were owned by some ruler; instead they now gave their loyalty to a new institution, the nation-state. Some innate atavism, probably dating back to before humans branched from the chimpanzees about 3 million years ago, seems to dictate the Naked Ape to give his loyalty to something bigger than himself. Which has delivered us to today's prevailing norm, the nation-state, a group of people who tend to share language, religion, and ethnicity. The idea of the nation-state is especially effective when it's organized as a "democracy," where the average person is given the illusion he has some measure of control over where the leviathan is headed.

On the plus side, by the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution had provided the common man with the personal freedom, as well as the capital and technology, to improve things at a rapidly accelerating pace.

What caused the sea change?

I'll speculate it was largely due to an intellectual factor, the invention of the printing press; and a physical factor, the widespread use of gunpowder. The printing press destroyed the monopoly the elites had on knowledge; the average man could now see that they were no smarter or "better" than he was. If he was going to fight them (conflict is, after all, what politics is all about), it didn't have to be just because he was told to, but because he was motivated by an idea. And now, with gunpowder, he was on an equal footing with the ruler's knights and professional soldiers.

Right now I believe we're at the cusp of another change, at least as important as the ones that took place around 12,000 years ago and several hundred years ago. Even though things are starting to look truly grim for the individual, with collapsing economic structures and increasingly virulent governments, I suspect help is on the way from historical evolution. Just as the agricultural revolution put an end to tribalism and the industrial revolution killed the kingdom, I think we're heading for another multipronged revolution that's going to make the nation-state an anachronism. It won't happen next month, or next year. But I'll bet the pattern will start becoming clear within the lifetime of many now reading this.

What pattern am I talking about? Once again, a reference to the evil (I hate to use that word too, in that it's been so corrupted by Bush and religionists) genius Karl Marx, with his concept of the "withering away of the State." By the end of this century, I suspect the U.S. and most other nation-states will have, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

The Problem with the State – and Your Nation-State

Of course, while I suspect that many of you are sympathetic to that sentiment, you also think the concept is too far out, and that I'm guilty of wishful thinking. People believe the state is necessary and – generally – good. They never even question whether the institution is permanent.

My view is that the institution of the state itself is a bad thing. It's not a question of getting the right people into the government; the institution itself is hopelessly flawed and necessarily corrupts the people that compose it, as well as the people it rules. This statement invariably shocks people, who believe that government is both a necessary and permanent part of the cosmic firmament.

The problem is that government is based on coercion, and it is, at a minimum, suboptimal to base a social structure on institutionalized coercion. I'm not going to go into the details here; I've covered this ground from a number of directions in previous editions of this letter, as well as in Crisis Investing (Chap.16), Strategic Investing (Chap. 32), and, most particularly Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s (Chap. 34). Again, let me urge you to read the Tannehills' superb The Market for Liberty, which is available for download free here.

One of the huge changes brought by the printing press and advanced exponentially by the Internet is that people are able to readily pursue different interests and points of view. As a result, they have less and less in common: living within the same political borders is no longer enough to make them countrymen. That's a big change from pre-agricultural times when members of the same tribe had quite a bit – almost everything – in common. But this has been increasingly diluted in the times of the kingdom and the nation-state. If you're honest, you may find you have very little in common with most of your countrymen besides superficialities and trivialities.

Ponder that point for a minute. What do you have in common with your fellow countrymen? A mode of living, (perhaps) a common language, possibly some shared experiences and myths, and a common ruler. But very little of any real meaning or importance. To start with, they're more likely to be an active danger to you than the citizens of a presumed "enemy" country, say, like Iran. If you earn a good living, certainly if you own a business and have assets, your fellow Americans are the ones who actually present the clear and present danger. The average American (about 50% of them now) pays no income tax. Even if he's not actually a direct or indirect employee of the government, he's a net recipient of its largesse, which is to say your wealth, through Social Security and other welfare programs.

Over the years, I've found I have much more in common with people of my own social or economic station or occupation in France, Argentina, or Hong Kong, than with an American union worker in Detroit or a resident of the LA barrios. I suspect many of you would agree with that observation. What's actually important in relationships is shared values, principles, interests, and philosophy. Geographical proximity, and a common nationality, is meaningless – no more than an accident of birth. I have much more loyalty to a friend in the Congo – although we're different colors, have different cultures, different native languages, and different life experiences – than I do to the Americans who live down the highway in the trailer park. I see the world the same way my Congolese friend does; he's an asset to my life. I'm necessarily at odds with many of "my fellow Americans"; they're an active and growing liability.

Read the rest here.

When we follow the money, we will come to realize that the evolution of political economic dynamics have already been indicative of the impending degeneracy and forthcoming obsolescence of the incumbent nation (welfare-warfare) states.

The foundations of the industrial age political system, which operates on a modern day industrial age (top-down) platform based on modified parasitical relationship via “democracy”, is apparently being gnawed by internal structural incoherence, systemic flaws and its rigidity or failure to adjust or adopt with changes of technology, market trends, environment and time.

The manifestations of which has been today’s self perpetuating financial crisis. Eventually self-fulfilling debt based collapse will likely culminate the end of the nation (welfare-warfare) state.

The deterioration of nation state will be compounded by rapid advances in technology where the information age will continue to usher in dramatic and radical changes in commerce and social lifestyles.

Where the printing press destroyed the “monopoly” of knowledge held by the elite, the advent of the internet connectivity, which has paved way for the emergence of geographically noncontiguous communication (information not limited by space or vicinity of one’s physical reach), has been neutralizing the top-down flow of communications emanating from the current construct of political institutions. That’s why centralized government have frantically been waging war with the web, desperately trying to censor and regulate the flow of information

Horizontally flow of communications has been democratizing information which should lead to the Hayekean knowledge revolution. And consequently, the knowledge revolution will provide the ideological underpinning for the transition towards decentralized societies.

The transformation may not be smooth nor peaceful, as there are multitudes of entrenched interest groups living off or benefiting from the current system. But again, unsustainable systems simply won’t last.

Along with visionary author Alvin Toffler, Professor Gary North, Professor Butler Shaffer and guru Doug Casey, I do share the view that decentralization’s ball has began rolling.

Quote of the Day: The Power of Scapegoatism

It is important to observe two points about projection:

[1] the power of the state depends upon the scapegoat, whose presence is necessary to disguise and diffuse the conflicts, corruption, and contradictions that underlie all political systems. Economic depressions, wars, police-state brutalities, the wholesale plundering of taxpayers, and a more general cultural collapse, must be seen as the evildoing of persons outside the establishment. In this way, petroleum company greed – rather than Federal Reserve policies – can be offered as an explanation for rising gasoline prices.

[2] The scapegoat need not be innocent of any wrongdoing. It is only essential that the substitute be seen as a wrongdoer, and that his or her role not be attributed to any established institutional interests. Soldiers who commit vicious crimes during wartime are guilty of what they have done. They can also serve as scapegoats to deflect the greater crimes of the war system itself…

If you want a career in politics, just be certain to keep a regular supply of scapegoats at your disposal, and to learn the fine art of quickly fabricating more in case of an emergency. The article of faith of all politicians – "never let a crisis go to waste" – demands this skill!

That’s from Law Professor and author Butler Shaffer at the LewRockwell.com.

I believe that scapegoatism have not been limited to politicians or to the would-be-practitioners, but also to people whose minds have been addled by politics.

Quote of the Day: Democracy as Instrument of Oppression

Great stuff from Professor Butler Shaffer at the LewRockwell.com,

Beyond this simplistic faith in a "social contract" theory of the state lies the reality that such systems have always been under the control of small groups of persons who are answerable to no one, particularly those they presume the authority to rule. "Democracy" is just one abstraction that the state owners have employed to distract the attention of their victims; to create in the minds of their subjects the illusion that they, not the owners, are running the system.

Believing that the state represents their interests, and that – through "democratic" processes - they control its direction and energies, most men and women identify themselves with that state. In this way, people and the state share the same "ego boundaries." When millions of people come together in this manner, it becomes easy for each to lose his or her individuality – and, hence, responsibility - in a collective identity. By engendering fear of others who share different ego-boundary identities, the state is able to mobilize "dark side" forces of the collective unconscious into a critical mass that allows the state to aggrandize its powers through violent, destructive means. Adolf Hitler used such methods to organize Germans against those he called non-Aryans. In the same way has the United States employed the specters of "communism," "drug-dealers," and "terrorism" to bamboozle its ego-boundary adherents into participating in its continuing war against life itself.

To anyone who makes a sincere effort to understand the nature of a supposedly democratic state, it is apparent that such a system rests on the flimsiest of foundations. People must be given the impression that, by voting, they are the show; they are steering the ship-of-state. But the corporate-state interests – the political establishment – that actually own the system, are not burdened by such delusions. The entire institutional order – including the state, major corporations, schools and universities, organized religions, and the mainstream media – share a common interest in keeping people subservient to their authority and control. At its most basic level – and as more of us have been learning of late – there are too many trillions of dollars of despoiled wealth, and too much power over the direction of human energy, to permit the establishment to allow preferences or even whims of ordinary people to upset institutional interests. In the words of Emma Goldman, "if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."

Read the rest here