Please Consider Helping Establish Homeschool Program
One of our Tribe Member and a listener to OZFest. Wanting to make a real difference, John has started Ambleside Preparatory Academy.
Ambleside is under an international CMI (Charlotte Mason Institute) organization called Alveary, which helps train and gives resources to teachers and families. We are a homeschool-hybrid K-12 school which means students attend partly on campus and partly at home during the week.
Latest On Cultural Courage from O
Severed Conscience – A Change in the Sovereignty Of The Mind
Self directed learning, curiosity, puzzling something out. There are all the traits we hope to foster in each generation. It is the type of mind that will not settle for what the Watchmakers like Bill Gates or other experts utter as us as though their words were programming code and our minds computers. The more time we spend gathering our knowledge online in a communal system, we must fight to take a step back and disassemble then re-assemble our train of thought. As humans, we mostly react, and even rational responses have a certain “feeling” to them as you make your judgements.
Virtue is found from pursuing the truth. Disabling your thinking mechanisms by influencing your emotions subconsciously is accomplished by overwhelming you senses and triggering dopamine release. Severed Conscience is the state where you are kept in patterns of behavior that become habituation, and you are siloed off and spend your time “behind your eyes” and not experiencing the real world with you other senses.
For those of us who grew up before communal learning, copy and paste thinking, and passive knowledge from merely browsing, we have a better chance of shaking ourselves awake. The last generation has no concept what it is like to not have access to collective minds. They grow up in the dopamine mills. Many teens know this, break away, but we need to provide theme more to battle the collective evils of group think that Severed Conscience seeks to engender, permanently.
AI as Master Instructor
The decades of television and movies of science fiction, and of late just spy movies like the latest installment of Mission Impossible, have accustomed us to the inevitability of an intelligence greater than our own. Combining access to all the facts from the man’s knowledge lodged in the internet, our culture is open to a Cyber Oracle. AI has a mystique that make many bow. That tendency, to not question authority and accept The Science, leaves us open to being manipulated further. AI has been developed to spot trends quickly, and based on training from a set of rules, can rapidly reply. In the online world where we only see text, this makes it easy to be convinced that you are interacting with a lively community.
Since AI can make predictions based on data and rules supplied by software engineers, it is easy to offer the speed with which it operates as a substitute for our wisdom.
Barefoot Doctors 2.0: Remove the Limits, with AI
Researching Mao’s Barefoot Doctors for an early episode of OZFest I came across this remarkable, and chilling example of creating armies of teens who would then be enlisted in carrying out medical examinations. As O as has said on many occasions, Saul Alinsky states the first order of instituting socialism is to go after Healthcare.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/off-the-cuff-barefoot-doctors/
Dr. Winnie Chi-man Yip
The barefoot doctor program was a low-cost strategy that achieved high health outcomes. Its core principle was to keep people healthy. And the program reached everybody—it was universal health care in its very core. Just as impressive, barefoot doctors were part of the community, understood the community, cared about the community, and were trusted by the community.
Today, many low- and middle-income nations are trying to build strong primary care systems that provide health promotion, disease prevention, accurate diagnosis, effective treatment, timely referral, and management of noncommunicable diseases—such as hypertension, diabetes, even some cancers and mental health problems. Unfortunately, lack of highly trained staff is a major bottleneck in building such systems.
My idea of a 21st-century barefoot doctor is someone with two to three years of training post–junior high school, who will be enabled with artificial intelligence and big-data-assisted decision support. Apps or web-based tools will use data analytics to prompt the doctors to ask the right questions, supply the likelihood of various diagnoses, and recommend treatment. It’s an algorithm decision tree, but supported by big-data analysis.
Even This Type of Thinking Is No Longer Aloud
The Gary Plan – It’s Not Communism But It’s Us
Being sway by an expert, or as Twain said, just an ordinary fellow from another town.
We rightfully identify the end result from the cooptation of our society and how we pass on morals, knowledge and wisdom. We are open to Communism, and the CCP certainly loves that. But Scientific Management fostered this effect, and those progenitors are industrialists. Communism, compliance, control for us while they harvest the rewards from a well ordered, scientifically tuned society.
Industrialist prior to the close of the 19th century theorized that society could be re-ordered by the principles of mechanics. Harmony was required. People could be regulated like machinery.
The Gary Plan was the first in a series of social engineering experiments with schools. Named after Gary, Indiana, where it was first tested, the Gary Plan departmentalized all courses. Students would move from room to room on regular intervals, each signified by a bell. We are so used to hearing a bell, we would think something was amiss if we didn’t have regimented periods.
How To Counter?
In the end, what skills do your kids need? Not what level of attainment, but what demonstrable skills can they use. What turns them into a self guided learner, because if a school system doesn’t provide, it’s up to you to step in. Some of the elements from these homeschool such as wood working, engine repair, robotics are things that many do, but schools do not support. The smart phone steals time from applying yourself in the real world. Remember when kids were over-scheduled?
Hands on, Handcraft
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloyd
Sloyd (Swedish slöjd), also known as educational sloyd, is a system of handicraft-based education started by Uno Cygnaeus in Finland in 1865. The system was further refined and promoted worldwide, and was taught in the United States until the early 20th century. It is still taught as a compulsory subject in Finnish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian schools.
Whole Person, Not Just The Mind
https://simplycharlottemason.com/what-is-the-charlotte-mason-method/
An Atmosphere, A Discipline, A Life
By “Atmosphere,” Charlotte meant the surroundings in which the child grows up. A child absorbs a lot from his home environment. Charlotte believed that the ideas that rule your life as the parent make up one-third of your child’s education.
By “Discipline,” Charlotte meant the discipline of good habits—and specifically habits of character. Cultivating good habits in your child’s life make up another third of his education.
The other third of education, “Life,” applies to academics. Charlotte believed that we should give children living thoughts and ideas, not just dry facts. So all of her methods for teaching the various school subjects are built around that concept.
For example, Charlotte’s students used living books rather than dry textbooks. Living books are usually written in narrative or story form by one author who has a passion for his topic. A living book makes the subject “come alive.”
And the students were required to tell back, or narrate, in their own words what was read in the living book, in order to secure it in their minds. No fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice for them; they practiced using rich language as they pointed out the ideas they gleaned from the reading and any mental connections they made between it and other ideas already residing in their growing minds and hearts.
She taught handwriting and spelling by using passages from great books that communicate great ideas rather than using just a list of words.
She encouraged spending time outdoors, interacting with God’s creation firsthand and learning the living ways of nature.
Classical Conversations / Trivium
Instead of integrated learning taught today in schools where a math book incorporates physics problems and charts and graphs, Classical Conversations holds that there are 3 distinct phases to learning. Memorization at beginning is key because the building blocks must be mastered.
Grammar – Foundations (Ages 4-9)
The Foundations phase focuses on the grammar stage of learning, where students memorize facts and foundational knowledge across various subjects, including history, science, math, and Latin. This phase is structured around a three-year cycle that covers different historical periods: Ancient, Middle Ages/Renaissance, and Modern United States history. Each cycle includes specific memory work that students learn through songs, chants, and hands-on activities
Dialectic (Performing) – Essentials (Ages 9-12)
The Essentials phase corresponds to the dialectic stage, where students begin to analyze and discuss the facts they learned in the Foundations phase. This program emphasizes critical thinking and communication skills – public speaking to class.
Rhetoric – Challenge (Ages 12-17)
The Challenge phase represents the rhetoric stage, where students synthesize their knowledge and learn to express their ideas effectively.