reading Gatto is like waking up and realising you really weren’t crazy all these years and they really are out to get you, heh. a true American hero.

<a href=”www.spinninglobe.net/gattopage.htm” title=”here” is a collection of articles he wrote for SKOLE, The Journal of American Education, along with some ideas from different alternative schooling groups, and is a collection of more philosophical essays of his on Preservenet, including The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, all required reading.

the url’s incase the links don’t take are spinninglobe-dot-net-slash-gettopage-dot-htm and preservenet-dot-com-slash-theory-slash-gatto-dot-html.

Michael is that Gatto’s whole Liberty Forum presentation? i was positively livid at having missed it when i found out he’d been there and am hoping he’s coming again this year – any word on that?

So how can we get kids to self-educate via cheap computers and the internet and let the school systems go hang?

They want $100 or more per book for some college courses. So books for 4 courses would pay for a netbook. Maybe the books are $20 in grade school.

But another factor with electronic books is that they don’t wear out and they can be upgraded a chapter or even a paragraph at a time. No need to buy new books. This ultimately presents a problem for the text book publishing business.

But I was really thinking about parents getting them for kids as a supplement to regular school or for home schooling. I think the computer revolution has not really hit yet in terms of what it can do for human knowledge. The companies just want everybody to upgrade every other year. Not actually acquire serious and relevant knowledge via computers.

I ran across a successful instance of computer education some time ago. The curious thing is that it doesn’t seem to be ballyhooed very much. You would think our educators want it swept under the rug.

Vero Beach High School, 1987

But that was 1987. What was happening with computers back then. Intel had not yet even introduced the 486 processor. The Pentium was 5 years away. How powerful a computer could you get for $5,000 in 1987?

Today some people want to put down these netbooks as not being powerful enough. This ain’t about power, it’s about money. How many companies want people jumping to $350 computers when they are trying to sell $1,000 machines?

But our issue is education. These netbooks can give kids cheap portability and they can do more than any $5,000 computer could back in 1987. So if they proved in Florida that kids likely to drop out could actually enjoy learning with computers what can really be done with these netbooks?

Do you ever think that there are really people who do not want a society of mostly well educated people? How do you maintain a class structured society without a segment of mis-educated peons?

The Fun They Had

We can have it 148 years early with Netbooks.

psik