What Compulsory Education Needs To Be

From 200 years back, compulsory education was by the industrialists - for the industrialists. Times have changed. It now needs to be by the people - for the people.

I'm right into liberation in education. But realistically a civilization needs a compulsory component, to teach the important basics to lay down a sustainable society.

The most obvious example is the need to teach the language of the civilization, so people can communicate efficiently with the masses beyond their local tribe. There's a reason why your parents were so anal about your spoken and written English - it was to ensure that your tendency to 'devolve' to the wayward local dialect did not get the better of your need to be universally understood. This acquired discipline is an example of 'civilization training'.

Another excellent (and pertinent) example, is the need to teach the young the basics on how economic development works. They need a factual explanation on why we are materially rich in the modern industrialized world, and how exactly it happened. If that education were given--and in the right, honest way--it would be very difficult for socialists to gain traction in the free world. This is because the masses, in first understanding how economic development actually works, would not need to be told what questions to ask when idealists try to sell them a dubious ideology. They will already be asking them.

The young also need to be taught about the humanities, such as the facts on child abuse and serious deprivation, and more specifically how it affects the developing brain and, in turn, the far-reaching social impacts of generating anti-social personalities. This is a well overdue 'update' for our modern Rome - education culture is still well behind science. So compulsory education needs to be about more than creating tax-payers, it needs to be about creating good people, and people who know how to create good people.

A nationalized compulsory sector also needs to teach on the right level, to avoid politicization. For example, in New Zealand today there's a push to teach about the historic New Zealand land wars. This is asking for trouble, as the room for political blame-gaming is obvious. It would be best to keep this kind of education strictly scientific. For example, talk about how over-population drives resource insecurity and in turn the drive for geographical expansion, which in turn leads to wars which are (usually or originally) a competition for resources. Also talk about the psychological impact of war and how it traumatizes and represses a society, which over time leads to militant and even savage cultures, etc...

Compulsory education should focus on developing an impartial understanding of humanity and history. That is what a sustainable society should want - and need. Again my point is that compulsory education needs to operate at the right level. Keep it strictly objective and fundamental - no partisan politics.

When you don't teach the young what they need to know, to protect themselves and their society, and to facilitate its intelligent progression, you obviously risk degeneration. All of us have a duty to pass on essential wisdom to youth. But in saying all of this, we need to teach for real. I assert that this will only happen when the young (and old) are free to think and digest important material in a real way.

The following image makes my point bluntly.

In our current education system we remove appreciation. Appreciation is where we don't just comprehend, but sit back and think about the material and maybe discuss it. It only happens when we care about more than scoring points on a test, and when we're not responding to immediate time pressures. Unfortunately, as it seems, our existing education system is designed to create the somewhat sterile mind fit for a bureaucracy or a trade. Information in modern schooling is only superficially learnt and does not induce a mature world view.

We like to say we're educated because we have certificates that tell us that, but I do not believe modern education means what we tend to think it means. Information must be genuinely digested to achieve the kind of education that goes beyond crude materialistic objectives. And again our current system is if anything designed to suppress that process. It's about creating economic soldiers for the economic machine.

So not only do we need to rethink the content of compulsory education, to preserve our civilization, we also need to rethink how education should functionally work. Do we really still need that giant army of narrowly-tuned institution workers? Maybe we did in the past, but with modern [and rapidly advancing] automation we don't need them now, or certainly not at historic scales. Again, we can rethink education, and in my view doing so would be timely and wise. If we don't want to end up like Venezuela or some kind of Nazi Germany, that is.

                                                   -Andrew Atkin

Pricing out the Poor - Deliberately

In the 80's New York had a massive crime problem. It was so bad that people were leaving in droves. The New York council finally solved the problem but they did so, in part, in an interesting way. They created laws that deliberately increased the cost of housing, and quite drastically. The effect was that the criminal class was (largely) priced out of New York. They moved on to cheaper 'victim' cities elsewhere.

This is what happens when you need to discriminate but can't, due to given anti-discrimination laws. You have to use indirect methods to discriminate, which may be much more destructive than just kicking the criminal class out of town outright, via force.

However, inflating the cost of housing to drive out criminals does nothing for general prosperity. Yet if it's the string in the bow that you must use to master a greater priority, then you will use it. To say, I myself would rather live in my car than tolerate a gang moving in next door. Social discomfort is amongst the worst kinds of discomfort. It's serious.

In Houston for example, which offers truly affordable housing and is the most prosperous city in America, the crime rate is steadily increasing because the city is comparatively attractive to the criminal class. Houston is beginning to suffer from toxic immigration because being attractive to poor people means attracting poor people, who are far more likely to be criminal as a statistical group.

Now, if Houston were allowed to be racist and make the law of "no blacks allowed" then this would largely solve the problem, albeit in a blunt and ugly way. This is because it's a fact that blacks, as a group, are far more likely to be criminal and create problems as compared to others. Indeed, William Levitt, who innovated the affordable post WW2 suburbs, did not sell the houses within his developments to blacks. This was not because he was a racist, but simply because the white people of the time did not want to live amongst blacks; and so, in response to consumer demand, he restricted access to whites only to keep the sale price up. Back in the 1940's and 50's people were ruthless. Racism kept the crime down, but again in an ugly and crude way.

On a more subtle level the same thing happens in Australasia today. Australians as a whole are somewhat openly racist (in culture - not media) and they have a reputation for it. Likewise, they suppress Polynesian immigration from New Zealand as Polynesians are afraid to move to Australia out of fear of open rejection. If Australians were not openly racist, I would say Brisbane would be the largest Polynesian city in the world - not Auckland. Again, as a group Polynesians are much more likely to be problematic than others coming from New Zealand. The blunt tool of racism keeps Australia's immigration problems (potential and real) in check.

Now let's go back to the New York example. Respecting how serious the need for social discrimination is--relating to criminals and the grossly uncouth--we might recognize, if I may speculate, the real heart of the drive towards engineering housing unaffordability. It might ultimately be nothing much more than a crude tool to preserve an idealised social atmosphere, as every district is forced to compete with other districts, and even nations, to keep the criminal class away of their areas.

Ok. Now look at Australia today. They have urban land containment policy in place that makes housing outrageously expensive, as restricted land supply forces land prices up to the point of ridiculous. If New Zealand did not play the same game (and it does) and retained affordable housing, then New Zealand would be a magnet for the least ideal people that Australia has to offer. So maybe it's so that New Zealand employs Rural Urban Boundaries, like Australia, specifically to inflate housing costs to in turn block [toxic] Australian immigration?

I have long preached that if we go back to affordable housing policy, then we may also need to adjust immigration controls to block unwanted people. But the problem is, in today's world that's difficult to do because it's just so easy to be accused of racism and "discrimination" by the political hit-squad of our time (that is, the extremist-Left) if you dared move in this direction. And to aggravate the problem further, the upper middle-classes are not too concerned about bad immigration because they, personally, do not have to deal with it. They work and live in areas well isolated from the criminal class in any circumstance. Alas, it's easy to have a nice opinion on immigration when you don't have to eat your own cake.

The great losers of the modern game are those struggling to buy a home, and especially the non-criminal poor. People with more limited means are deprived of an affordable house, and people who are somewhat poor yet civilized are nonetheless forced to live amongst dangerous and depressing people. I'm not a fan of any of this.

There's a better solution to this difficult problem. We can allow new, private developments to be built, where the residents have the power to filter people in and out of their areas at their discretion, using online video interviews. This way if someone has tattoos all over their face and speaks with hostile tension, people will be free to act on the obvious where our legal systems would otherwise not. This can give people affordable housing and a good social climate combined. We would just have to stand up to the extremist-Left, who will naturally try to stop it in the name of their simplistic idea of 'rights'.

I have written about this before. See link Here.

New Zealand would also need to revise immigration policy with Australia, when and if it introduces affordable housing. This is sensitive, but do-able and necessary.

                                               -Andrew Atkin

Addition: Levittown - Achieving affordable housing.

THE END OF ALL CITIES

Let me give you a romantic picture. You live in a beautiful little village of about 300 persons. They're your kind of people, and there are no criminals or gangs as those people were kicked out long ago. It's a sunny village, with lots of plants and extremely light traffic, and with discrete roading that doesn't dominate the atmosphere. Instead natural sounds and rugged garden dominates. It's a relaxing place, friends and a cafe' are walking distance, and the work loads are comfortable. Everyone works only around six hours a day to get the jobs done, and they rarely stress over anything much in their professional world. The older people are more of a help than a burden, as they slow down yet don't stop. No one second-guesses whether they can pay the bills and put food on the table, and the food is excellent. The houses are modest, but well-windowed and with good privacy, yet placed in beautiful settings so no-one feels a pressing need to 'escape' or up-size in exchange for crippling debt.

Now here is the problem. Except in the most lucky areas, that was not quite the picture of the old-world village. In some ways it was, with the peace and the beautiful atmosphere, but the poverty factor was prevalent. And so, people were driven to cities for the natural advantages that could be provided by industrialisation.

Jumping into the stack-and-pack of those particularly nasty early cities was no fun. If the prosperous village as I described it was the norm, I doubt we ever would have fled to the cities. People would have seen no point in it, and they would have been automatically revolted by the comparatively awful existential conditions.

The city as we know it is and always has been a compromise. Most people don't like living close together in unnatural settings, nor amongst people they would rather not have to know. Indeed, always we see the wealthy moving to the most beautiful areas in a city, with the least ambient traffic and social tension.

Those who can afford the best of both worlds of course embrace it. But even the rich tolerate compromise. The leafy suburbs are no utopia as they're rarely leafy enough, nor private or spacious enough, because the wealthy still need to avoid a punishingly long commute. And that means tolerating a degree stack-and-pack, typical of classic suburbia. The final result, is a luke-warm version of what we really want, at best.

The reason why cities are powerful economic drivers is of course the agglomeration dynamic. That is, the ability to connect many individuated parts into an efficient co-operative whole; allowing for economies of scale, competition (fuelling innovation and commercial discipline), and advanced specialisation.

The old way of achieving agglomeration was (and is) by keeping business and people geographically close together. Again, this all-powerful economic dynamic is what drove us out of the semi-rural ideal. But I argue that this is about to change, and radically so.

There are three major technologies that will make geographically-based agglomeration obsolete. The internet moving into 5G, driverless cars, and mobile robotics.

To put it most simply, the result will be that no-one will need to leave home to get nearly anything done, to either work or live. Hence, location won't mean much for agglomeration. The city--or should I say 'the agglomeration dynamic'--will be replaced by the electronic cloud and its sprouting mechanical limbs.

Soon we can, and will, go back to the natural ideal of mass-decentralisation, and into what I call private cells; that is, self-selecting villages of your kind of people, built in the very best environments and in the image of good living, uncompromised by the need to get to work. The evolving result will be the death of the city as we know it.

The starting gun for mass-geographical decentralisation will be the implementation of driverless cars [Correction: Covid-19 has started it], which is a truly revolutionary movement only a few years away. As soon as a small car can drive itself to the next customer, it's game-over for transport as we know it.

With driverless technology's capacity to rapidly post any item anywhere, and at very low cost, standardised and highly flexible mobile robots can be put to work 24/7, doing various jobs throughout the metropolitan area. The robots will rapidly pay for themselves due to their then high immediate productivity. Most constructive operations will outsource to robotics services, and as soon as they become available. (Especially with our love affair with forever increasing the minimum wage).

5G internet is being rolled out today, and this will take care of itself of course. But it's noteworthy that 5G is important to facilitate timely remote-controlling, when and as required, for mobile robotics to be practical. 5G is an important supporting technology. It's also far superior for practical video-intercom.

Worried about the environment being ruined from "hyper sprawl"? Please don't. Contrary to decades of propaganda, the geographical human footprint on the natural world has always been a food issue, not a housing issue, and garden-style residential developments that are more planted than concreted are in no way an environmental toxin. Also, with driverless transport we will see a remarkable increase in automotive efficiency. Driverless cars may use only about 10% of current energy for a given transport productivity (too long-winded to explain here, but I will just say that transport today is morbidly inefficient compared to theoretical potentials).

There will always be mega-centres of built up areas, but they will have more to do with supporting highly automated industrial bases, recreation, and meeting the demand for mate-selection, etc, than the need to travel to work or go shopping. Otherwise, we will see most of us will go back to a modern style of remarkably beautiful, private, plant-ridden villages, with technology and convenience on tap. And the short, temporary, and too often painful age of the live-in city will be over.

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-Andrew Atkin