Re: [seul-edu] education and schools

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

Michael Viron wrote:

>> Many people confuse school with education, but generally

>> education proceeds faster and deeper when schools as such 
>> are not involved, because productive relationships 
>> separations/isolations) and patterns can form which school 
>> would otherwise block or at least repress because they do 
>> not harmonise with the pattern which is the school itself. 

> As a very recent college graduate, I would have to say that this is not
> necessarily the case.  Some schools, including The University of West
> Florida (UWF), give you the ability to take courses that may not be at all
> connected with your major as "electives" or dual-major should you so choose
> (one of my friends graduated recently with a dual-major--Computer Science
> and Music).

We may be talking a little at cross purposes here. University is quite a 
different thing to ``school'' as such, and it sounds like your 
experience is a little more self-directed than usual (the short term for 
this is ``atypical'' :-)

My comments were directed to the general case, and would be more 
strongly true for the earlier grades (and grade groupings themselves are 
one of the limiting factors important in repressing ``free-range'' 
social pattern forming) than for University.

> A few others come to mind including continuing to consult (as an alumni)

Note that none of the above organisations, with the exception of 
WebSpinners, is founded on a school. There is no minimum educational 
certification for joining LPI, for example. School, as such, is the main 
ingredient in stone soup here. (-:

>> Synergy, on the other hand, depends upon the participants marching to 
>> the same drummer, so to speak. Humans being as they are, this generally 
>> requires one of those horrid leader things to be beating a drum 
>> (co-ordinating, at least).

> Depends on whether the leader or coordinator micro-manages everything or
> lets people do as they need--some leaders can be very good at coordinating
> / leading projects.

Again, it is important that some project leadership be micromanagers 
sometimes and in some situations, and that in other times and situations 
their hand be hardly felt. Variety is the spice of life and never more 
so than in politics or Open Source software. One of the important 
principles behind evolutionary theory is that there be as wide a variety 
of organisms as possible for natural selection to operate on, and while 
this doesn't happen in natural life (there was nothing resembling a 
range of organisms from which to select turtles, for example; the cost 
of a beneficial mutation is invariably much higher than the actual 
benefit) it does happen in the very artificial world of computing.

> Just my .02,

Pleased to see it. (-: