individualism for the masses
April 28, 2013 3 Comments
Last month, I mentioned America’s first individualist anarchist, Anne Hutchinson. She’s a hero of mine, for obvious reasons, despite my not sharing her religious beliefs.
One of the several reasons I’m enjoying Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates is that I’m learning more about Hutchinson. For example, I love this detail:
March 26, 2013 Leave a comment
My 6-year-old son, Benjamin, is asking when we will start to build robots together. A friend of mine is talking about starting a robotics club in the Charlottesville area, and I think Benjamin is now picturing us creating the autonomous bots and droids of science fiction. I’m trying to lower his expectations a bit, first by introducing him to programming through MIT’s wonderful Scratch system and iPad games like CargoBot, Cato’s Hike, Kodable, and Benjamin’s favorite: A.L.E.X.
So when I saw something on Hulu.com the other night about “Team Robotics,” I had to take a quick look. Hulu immediately warned me, “This video is intended for mature audiences.”
Really? Would this turn out to be some sci-fi fantasy about gynoid sexbots? That sure wasn’t the impression I was getting from the picture of Team Robotics: Read more of this post
February 5, 2013 2 Comments
[Cross-posted to InvisibleOrder.com]
Mike Reid of InvisibleOrder.com has written about the Orwellian manipulation of language in “The Voice of Tyranny.”
As libertarians in the language business, we have both an ideological and very practical attachment to this subject.
In the City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, Michael Knox Beran has written a fascinating and scary article about the history and ideology behind the school subject of “social studies” — a made-up topic, developed a century ago by progressives to replace the supposedly individualistic study of history with a collectivist focus on community membership, community ownership, and (originally, at least) economic central planning. Beran explains where this mission did and did not take hold, why, and how. I recommend the entire article, but of particular relevance to Invisible Order and other devotees of liberty and language is this passage on the writing style employed in social-studies text books:
November 2, 2010 Leave a comment
I really appreciated this comment in the school-choice post on the Mises Blog.
The context is that “schools that don’t address bullying might lose federal funding from the Department of Education.”
“David C” replies,
Then by that standard, all the schools should lose funding, because I can tell you from experience that the big bullies in the schools are not students, but the teachers and administrators. The students are just copying their mentors. But this makes perfect sense, because the biggest bully of all are the state and federal governments who attack the taxpayer. The teachers and administrators are just taking marching orders from their bosses, who have driven out the passive workers long ago.
November 1, 2010 Leave a comment
While talking about the Industrial Revolution, Bill Bryson writes,
Hargreaves’s machine doesn’t look like much in illustrations — it was essentially just ten bobbins on a frame, with a wheel to make them rotate — but it transformed Britain’s industrial prospects. Less happily, it also hastened the introduction of child labor because children, nimbler and smaller than adults, were better able to make running repairs to broken threads and the like in the jenny’s more inaccessible extremities. [emphasis added]
Then later, while talking about a period prior to the Industrial Revolution, he writes,
For most human beings, children and adults both, the dominant consideration in life until modern times was purely, unrelievedly economic. In poorer households — and that is what most homes were, of course — every person was, from the earliest possible moment, a unit of production. John Locke, in a paper for the Board of Trade in 1697, suggested that the children of the poor should be put to work from the age of three, and no one thought that unrealistic or unkind. The Little Boy Blue of the nursery rhyme — the one who failed to keep the sheep from the meadow and the cows from the corn — is unlikely to have been more than about four years old; older hands were needed for more robust work. [emphasis added]
The first claim matches the established wisdom — the version first promoted by 19th-century socialists and conservatives, a version that Austrians such as F.A. Hayek and Ralph Raico taught me to be skeptical of. The second claim seems to contradict the first claim — seems, in fact, like it could have been plucked from a libertarian essay disputing the established wisdom. What am I missing?
September 23, 2010 Leave a comment
A comrade wrote me this note:
I wanted to ask you about homeschooling. I am very interested in it, though Benjamin is not even 18 months yet. Any pointers or comments to think about?
(Yes, we both have sons named Benjamin.)
He then asked if he could share my reply with a libertarian mailing list he’s on, and I said yes, so I figure I might as well share it here, too:
I started researching homeschooling before our Benjamin was even born, so I don’t think 18 months is too young. Here’s a book I very much recommend well before you look into formal homeschooling:
The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
http://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Handbook-Sixth-Jim-Trelease/dp/0143037390
http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/It’s addressed to teachers and policy people as well as to parents. I just skipped the political BS. I didn’t even care about the specific reading lists. And yet I consider it one of the most important books I’ve read.
We belong to a big mailing list of area homeschoolers. I hope you can find one in your area, because it’s very helpful. Topics range from government paperwork to curricula to local classes to playgroups and other social opportunities for homeschoolers.
For homeschooling specifically, I think the first thing to do is to become familiar with the different approaches. Most of the homeschoolers I know are secular and most of the secular homeschoolers I know are unschoolers. I don’t know what to recommend to introduce you to unschooling. It’s not the route we’re taking.
We’re more inclined to the classical homeschooling and the Trivium:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium_%28education%29
http://web.archive.org/web/20040415041359/http://redeemerclassical.org/lost_tools.phpSpecifically, we’re pursuing the approach to the Trivium given in the book The Well-Trained Mind:
http://www.amazon.com/Well-Trained-Mind-Guide-Classical-Education/dp/0393067084
http://www.welltrainedmind.com/The Well-Trained Mind was written by a mother and daughter. The mother homeschooled the daughter and now the daughter homeschools her kids.
We’re also using the mother’s phonics book:
http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Parents-Guide-Teaching-Reading/dp/0972860312
We’re not yet at the stage to assess her language-arts book:
http://www.amazon.com/First-Language-Lessons-Well-Trained-Mind/dp/0971412979
For early mathematics, we’re using Right Start Math, recommended by The Well-Trained Mind:
http://www.alabacus.com/pageView.cfm?pageID=284
Having said all that, I still recommend you become familiar with Art Robinson’s approach:
http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/
You’ve probably read Gary North’s recommendations of the Robinson Curriculum.
Our goal is eventually to integrate the structure of the Well-Trained Mind with the self-teaching method of the Robinson Curriculum.
I’ll copy my wife on this to see if she has anything to add.
Good luck.
September 20, 2010 2 Comments
Barbara Frank writes,
Schools are increasingly reducing the amount of history taught to today’s children. A while back I noted in one of my newsletters that in North Carolina schools, there’s a proposal to stop teaching events in U.S. history that occurred before 1877. Meanwhile, in England they’re reducing and sometimes even eliminating the study of history in schools
Her assessment: "This is tragic."
I’m not so sure. Why is it a bad thing that governments might stop teaching their official version of history?
In my experience, the hardest thing about talking to people about real history is all the fake history that was used to indoctrinate them (I mean, us) back in school. Didn’t the Industrial Revolution create poverty? Weren’t the masses worse off in the era of laissez-faire? (Wasn’t there an era of laissez-faire?) Wasn’t the Civil War about slavery? Didn’t Lincoln free the slaves? Didn’t the Civil War settle the question of secession? Didn’t Progressives save us through increased regulation? Wasn’t Big Business opposed to the Progressive Era growth in regulation? Didn’t laissez-faire lead to the Great Depression? Didn’t the New Deal get us out of the Depression? (Or was it World War II that got us out of the Great Depression?) Wasn’t World War II “the good war” fought by “the greatest generation,” thereby improving the conditions of people throughout Europe? Didn’t the Marshall Plan save Europe? And on and on.
I’ve read antihomeschoolers expressing fear of the radical values homeschoolers are promulgating outside the reach of the guiding hand of the state. I wish it were so.
I’m shocked by how radical homeschoolers aren’t.
I’m dismayed by how low the general suspicion of the state is in homeschooling circles (or maybe it’s just the secular homeschooling circles with which I’m more familiar).
In my opinion, the mass indoctrination that takes place in government-school history classes is one of the most insidious aspects of the 20th century.
Having the state back off from that agenda (if that’s what they’re really doing) is difficult for me to see as tragic.
September 15, 2010 Leave a comment
It’s worth reading all of this very short post at BarbaraFrankOnline about hiring online tutors in India, but I wanted to excerpt this one parenthetical comment:
Many parents lack confidence in teaching their children math beyond a basic level. I don’t know why this is, since you relearn everything along with the child (at least that’s been my experience.)
I think this all the time when people say, "I don’t think I know enough to homeschool my kids." And yes, I hear that surprisingly often.
There’s plenty I don’t know, but I assume I have at least the same capacity to learn the subject as my 4-year-old son has. In fact, that’s a big part of the attraction of homeschooling.
In the waiting room outside Benjamin’s karate class this afternoon, I started reading the beginning of the first RightStart Math manual, which the missus is teaching the boy right now. It was fascinating.
Math was always my worst subject. Now is my opportunity to start over.
I realized when Benjamin was still inside his pregnant mama that I didn’t know nearly enough history. I’ve been reading mostly history books (and listening to history audiobooks and lectures) for the past 4 years. Now I’m a born-again history buff, an ardent convert (as this blog surely reflects).
Homeschooling is a perfect choice for the autodidact. And one of my goals is to give Benjamin the education I wish I had had.
May 29, 2010 Leave a comment
Here’s the new “Austrian Spin on The Three Little Pigs,” via the Mises Blog.
And here’s my more modest attempt from a few years ago.
Father of Benjamin, husband of Nathalie, BK Marcus works from Charlottesville, Virginia, as a publishing consultant.
He is the former managing editor of Mises.org and the founder of Invisible Order.
