I’ve been tagged by Po Moyemu. The Rules are:

1. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
2. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and
   1. posts their names,
   1. then goes to their blogs
   2. and leaves them a comment,
      1. letting them know that they have been tagged
      2. and asking them to read your blog.

My list:

1. I’m glad I grew up in New York City, but I’d never want to live there again.
2. I’m glad I didn’t marry young; I don’t think it would have stuck.
3. I don’t believe in fate.
4. I can’t believe my good luck in finding and marrying a woman who will put up with me.
5. I continue to think my son is a gift from God.
6. I don’t believe in God.
7. I seem to have managed to combine my job and my calling — and to do it from home!
8. I would push the button.

I don’t believe I know 8 people who would be happy to get tagged with this, so I’ll just create a list below and fill it in with the first 8 people to let me know they’re willing:

1. Monster Fool
2. Choicy White Boy
3. Anthony Gregory
4. Radical Liberation
5. FanQuia

“Oh no!” she protested, “John Dewey was an individualist!”

I was at a neighborhood party a few years ago, talking to a student from the local university education school. She had told me that her hero was John Dewey, and I had said I’d heard Dewey was an anti-individualist. When she contradicted me, I didn’t argue the point. But although she was the graduate student and I was just a townie, I didn’t really trust her to know her own subject. She didn’t exactly radiate intelligence. I assume she’s teaching somewhere now.

This is from John Taylor Gatto, via Po Moyemu:

In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future.

It is absolutely worth reading the rest of the excerpt, if not the entire speech, but I think I’ll only quote one more section:

Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. You keep the games and songs and pretty colors in balance with the soberer purpose. That’s if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.

Kilmer Middle School in Vienna, Virginia (a Washington, D.C. suburb) has instituted a prohibition against any and all physical contact “so strict that students can be sent to the principal’s office for hugging, holding hands or even high-fiving.”

Book of Joe has the details.