Arcata, CA
Tuesday October 21, 2003
7:23am I just woke up in the barn.
I count seventeen so far.
8:45am I'm walking away from the barn. I gotta go take a shit at the Cash Oil. Oh yeah, someone told me they put up this No Trespassing sign up by the Cash Oil and people can't hang out there and drink coffee in the morning. That's total bullshit. If you spend money at a place, you should be able to hang out there. That's dumb.
The field was all wet. I am lucky I found another plastic bag to put over my boot.
8:53am I'm in the bathroom at the Cash Oil.
9:05am I'm done at the Cash Oil. I'm going to go spange up a donut. I'm hungry.
9:11am I'm at the donut shop now.
9:19am Doyce came out of the donut shop and I asked him for change. He said, "Nope, but I have a cigarette for you."
9:28am Jamie is hooking me up with some change for a donut. I appreciate it, Jamie.
9:42am Nancy gave me a whole dollar! That's very generous of you, Nancy.
I bought a donut and read my book in the donut shop.
Page 398 Chapter 18 Education in the Future Tense.
"In the quickening race to put men and machines on the planets, tremendous resources are devoted to making possible a "soft landing." Every sub-system of the landing craft is exquisitely designed to withstand the shock of arrival. Armies of engineers, geologists, physicists, metallurgists, and other specialists concentrate years of work on the problem of landing impact. Failure of any sub-system to function after touch-down could destroy human lives, not to mention billions of dollars worth of apparatus and tens of thousands of man-years of labor.
Today one billion human beings, the total population of the technology-rich nations, are speeding towards a rendezvous with super-industrialism. Must we experience mass future shock? Or can we, too, achieve a "soft landing?" We are rapidly accelerating our approach. The craggy outlines of the new society are emerging from the mists of tomorrow. Yet even as we speed closer, evidence mounts that one of our most critical sub-systems - education - is dangerously malfunctioning.
What passes for education today, even in our "best" schools and colleges, is a hopeless anachronism. Parents look to education to fit their children for life in the future. Teachers warn that lack of an education will cripple a child's chances in the world of tomorrow. Government ministries, churches, the mass media - all exhort young people to stay in school, insisting that now, as never before, one's future is almost wholly dependent upon education.
Yet for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backward toward a dying system, rather than forward to the emerging new society. Their vast engergies are applied to cranking out Industrial Men - people tooled for survival in a system that will be dead before they are.
To help avert future shock, we must create a super-industrial education system. And to do this, we must search for our objectives and methods in the future, rather than the past."
Page 409, Yesterday's Curriculum Today
"As for curriculum, the Councils of the Future, instead of assuming that every subject taught today is taught for a reason, should begin from the reverse premise: nothing should be included in a required curriculum unless it can be strongly justified in terms of the future. If this means scrapping a substantial part of the formal curriculum, so be it.
This is not intended as an "anti-cultural" statement or a plea for total destruction of the past. Nor does it suggest that we can ignore such basics as reading, writing and math. What it does mean is that tens of millions of children today are forced by law to spend precious hours of their lives grinding away at material whose future utility is highly questionable. (Nobody even claims it has much present utility.) Should they spend as much time as they do learning French, or Spanish or German? Are the hours spent on English maximally useful? Should all students be required to study algebra? Might they not benefit more from studying probability? Logic? Computer programming? Philosophy? Aesthetics? Mass communications?
Anyone who thinks the present curriculum makes sense is invited to explain to an intelligent fourteen-year-old why algebra of French or any other subject is essential for him. Adult answers are almost always evasive. The reason is simple: the present curriculum is a mindless holdover from the past.
Why, for example must teaching be organized around such fixed disciplines as English, economics, mathematics, or biology? Why not around stages of the human life cycle: a course on birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, retirement, death. Or around contemporary social problems? Or around significant technologies of the past and future? Or around countless other imaginable alternatives?
The present curriculum and its division into air-tight compartments is not based on any well thought out conception of contemporary human needs. Still less is it based on any grasp of the future, any understanding of what skills Johnny will require to live in the hurricane's eye of change. It is based on inertia - and a bloody clash of academic guilds, each bent on aggrandizing its budget, pay scales and status.
This obsolete curriculum, furthermore, imposes standardization on the elementary and secondary schools. Youngsters are given little choice in determining what they wish to learn. Variations from school to school are minimal. The curriculum is nailed into place by the rigid entrance requirements of the colleges, which, in turn, reflect the vocational and social requirements of a vanishing society.
In fighting to update education, the prognostic cells of the revolution must set themselves up as curriculum review boards. Attempts by the present educational leadership to revise the physics curriculum, or improve the methods for teaching English or math are piecemeal at best. While it may be important to preserve aspects of the present curriculum and to introduce changes gradually, we need more than haphazard attempts to modernize. We need a systematic approach to the whole problem.
These revolutionary review groups must not, however, set out to design a single all-purpose, permanent new curriculum. Instead, they must invent sets of temporary curricula - along with procedures for evaluation and renovation as time goes by. There must be a systematic way to make curricular changes without necessarily triggering bloody intramural conflict each time.
A fight must also be waged to alter the balance between standardization and variety in the curriculum. Diversity carried to its extreme could produce a non-society in which the lack of common frames of reference would make communication between people even more difficult than it is today. Yet the dangers of social fragmentation cannot be met by maintaining a highly homogenous education system while the rest of the society races towards heterogeneity.
On way to resolve the conflict between the need for variety and the need for common reference points is to distinguish in education between "data," as it were, and "skills."
12:55pm About five minutes ago I finally talked to Rosendo. He gave me two more bus tickets and I gotta go to the mall at 3pm and get my glasses. I need to get a receipt saying I had to pay fourteen cash out of my pocket, so The Endeavor can reimburse me . . . tomorrow morning.
On page 419 I found a good quote by Freud. "Thought is action in rehearsal." Oh yeah, be sure to include The Strategy of Futureness on page 418. The whole section.
"THE STRATEGY OF FUTURENESS
Three hundred and fifty years after his death, scientists are still finding evidence to support Cervantes' succinct insight into adaptational psychology: "Forewarned fore-armed." Self-evident as it may seem, in most situations we can help individuals adapt better if we simply provide them with advance information about what lies ahead.
Studies of the reactions of astronauts, displaced families, and industrial workers almost uniformly point to this conclusion. "Anticipatory information," writes psychologist Hugh Bowen, "allows...a dramatic change in performance." Whether the problem is that of driving a car down a crowded street, piloting a plane, solving intellectual puzzles, playing a cello or dealing with interpersonal difficulties, performance improves when the individual knows what to expect next.
The mental processing of advance data about any subject presumably cuts down on the amount of processing and the reaction time during the actual period of adaptation. It was Freud, I believe, who said, "Thought is action in rehearsal."
Even more important than any specific bits of advance information, however, is the habit of anticipation. This conditioned ability to look ahead plays a key role in adaptation."
Umm, I just checked and there's like three more pages to that section. Therefore, I am not going to copy it all. If you want to read the whole thing, go check out the book. Let me at least include the last paragraph of the section:
"When millions share this passion about the future we shall have a society far better equipped to meet the impact of change. To create such curiosity and awareness is a cardinal task of education. To create an education that will create this curiosity is the third, and perhaps central, mission of the super-industrial revolution in the schools.
Education must shift into the future tense."
1:20pm Sho just gave me a cigarette in front of the donut shop. He gave me the one he was smoking and I asked him if he had another one and he said, "No, you can have this one." I appreciate it, brother.
1:31pm Riding the bus. I hadn't marked my page so I ended up reading a part I had already read. I want to include this part on page 422, though:
"When it comes to locating the child in time, however, we play a cruel and disabling trick on him. He is steeped, to the extent possible, in his nation's past and that of the world. He studies ancient Greece and Rome, the rise of feudalism, the French Revolution, and so forth. He is introduced to Bible stories and patriotic legends. He is peppered with endless accounts of wars, revolutions and upheavals, each one dutifully tagged with its appropriate date in the past.
At some point he is even introduced to "current events." He may be asked to bring in newspaper clippings, and a really enterprising teacher may go so far as to ask him to watch the evening news on television. He is offered, in short, a thin sliver of the present.
And then time stops. The school is silent about tomorrow. "Not only do our history courses terminate with the year they are taught," wrote Professor Ossip Flechtheim a generation ago, "but the same situation exists in the study of government and economics, psychology and biology." Time comes racing to a abrupt halt. The student is focused backward instead of forward. The future, banned as it were from the classroom, is banned from his consciousness as well. It is as though there were no future."
1:47pm I am at Bayshore Mall. I am going to smoke the cigarette I bummed from Sho.
1:54pm I came to the bathroom here at the food court that I know about because I was here last time. I'm going to take a shit and read my book.
Wow, Chapter 19, Taming Technology on page 428 is awesome.
TAMING TECHNOLOGY
"Future shock - the disease of change - can be prevented. But it will take drastic social, even political action. No matter how individuals try to pace their lies, no matter what psychic crutches we offer them, no matter how we alter their education, the society as a whole will still be caught on a runaway treadmill until we capture control of the accelerative thrust itself.
The high velocity of change can be traced to many factors. Population growth, urbanization, the shifting proportions of young and old - all play their part. Yet technological advance is clearly a critical node in the network of causes; indeed, it may be the node that activates the entire net. One powerful strategy in the battle to prevent mass future shock, therefore, involves the conscious regulation of technological advance.
We cannot and must not turn off the switch of technological progress. Only romantic fools babble about returning to a "state of nature." A state of nature is one in which infants shrivel and die for lack of elementary medical care, in which malnutrition stultifies the brain, in which, as Hobbes reminded us, the typical life is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To turn our back on technology would be not only stupid but immoral.
Given that a majority of men still figuratively live in the twelfth century, who are we even to contemplate throwing away the key to economic advance? Those who prate anti-technological nonsense in the name of some vague "human values" need to be asked "which humans?" To deliberately turn back the clock would be to condemn billions to enforced and permanent misery at precisely the moment in history when their liberation is becoming possible. We clearly need not less but more technology.
At the same time, it is undeniably true that we frequently apply new technologies stupidly and selfishly. In our haste to milk technology for immediate economic advantage, we have turned our environment into a physical and social tinderbox.
The speed-up of diffusion, the self-reinforcing character of technological advance, by which each forward step facilitates not one but many additional further steps, the intimate link-up between technology and social arrangements - all these create a form of psychological pollution, a seemingly unstoppable acceleration of the pace of life.
This psychic pollution is matched by the industrial vomit that fills our skies and seas. Pesticides and herbicides filter into our foods. Twisted automobile carcasses, aluminum cans, non-returnable glass bottles and synthetic plastics form immense kitchen middens in our midst as more and more of our detritus resists decay. We do not even begin to know what to do with our radioactive wastes - whether to pump them into the earth, shoot them into outer space, or pour them into the oceans.
Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate. We risk thermopollution of the oceans themselves, overheating them, destroying immeasurable quantities or marine life, perhaps even melting the polar icecaps. On land we concentrate such large masses of population in such small urban-technological islands, that we threaten to use up the air's oxygen faster than it can be replaced, conjuring up the possibility of new Saharas where cities are now. Through such disruptions of the natural ecology, we may literally, in the words of biologist Barry Commoner, be "destroying this planet as a suitable place for human habitation."
2:10pm I'm going to go see if I've got new glasses!
2:19pm I got me my glasses! This is awesome! I can see! Wow! Kickass!
2:30pm I'm on the bus back to Arcata.
2:45pm I rode the bus to The Raven House. I'm going to take a chower.
5:44pm I'm done at The Raven House. I'm going to hitchhike to Arcata.
6:02pm David is being cool enough to give me a ride, already. That's awesome.
6:19pm I'm back in Arcata!
6:29pm I called this one. I told myself, "I'm going to go up to the plaza and see if someone will smoke me out." Good 'ol Dustin is going to smoke me out. Cool.
I'm so happy I got my glasses.
6:45pm I just bummed a shag rolly off Dave . . . and he even lit it for me!
7:20pm Chad was generous enough to hook me up with a filtered cigarette. Just what I wanted. Rollies hurt my throat since I'm sick. I guess I should take that as a sign not to smoke, hehe.
7:21pm Me, Jonathan, some other dude, Jenny, her son Devan and Dave and Kerouac all piled into Joe's car and he's going to drive us to the barn. But first we came to his car where he played this really cool music. What's the name of the band? Sigurros, umlaut over the o. It's some cool music. This old guy even walked in front of the car and stopped to listen to it. The name of the song we just listened to is called Oleson, Oleson. However you spell it. Download it off Kazaa and check it out.
8:45pm Dude, we just got back from a hellish ride listening to Joe's music. Umm, the music was cool, but no that cool. Joe was going on and on about how cool it was. We went on this like half hour car ride with all these people crammed in the car. I tried not to let it annoy me. The whole time I was wanting to be at the barn, I had had enough of Sigurros. Well, he did have Jenny fueling him on because she thought it was that cool, too. But I was like, "Hmm, I'm not going to let it get me down. What I'm going to do is just sit here and enjoy how torturous this is for Jonathan, the annoying black dude." That was just making me laugh the whole time, to myself. When Joe had pulled over he asked everyone, "Do you guys just want to sit here and listen to it some more?" Me assuming that Jonathan didn't like that music, but when Joe finally pulled over by the railroad tracks and I popped out of the car on the way to the barn, Jonathan was the last one to get out. So, check out the group, their Icelandic. If you like it, you can listen to it a lot, too. But, it's not my thing. Like I said, it was cool, just not that cool.
8:55pm I got to the barn and just realized my water bottle was empty. The Cash Oil is closed, I think, so I'm going to have to venture way out for some water.
9:30pm Oh yeah, dumbass me. I started walking back across the field and I heard Jonathan and other people walking over to the barn. I assumed Joe had taken off in his car and left. I walked up to Jonathan and said, "Hey, did you like that music or not?" Strangely, Jonathan didn't mention much about it. He said something like, "It was a ride from hell," under his breath. I told him, "Yeah, at first it annoyed me a bit, but then I laughed in comfort knowing it was driving you nuts having to listen to that shit." Man, the whole time Joe was right there listening to what I told Jonathan. Hey, it was dark. He was right next to us. Jonathan took that as his cue saying, "Ha! You're talking shit about this dude and he's right here! Don't you feel stupid?"
At first, I did kind of, but then I snapped out of it thinking, "I'm not ashamed of the truth. I still don't think it was that cool." Joe had even agreed with me kind of, saying, "I know, everyone is different." Then, we came all the way to the barn and Joe starts talking about the band even more to me! He's a Sigurros fanatic. I guess that's kind of respectable for someone to devote themselves so much and to know that much about a band. But like I said, that's just not my bag. Well, I'm going to crash out now.
Oh yeah, I think I'm going to stay in Arcata until after I get my Aids test results. I'm not going to go back to San Antonio and unleash the book like that. Damnit, I have to wait for like three months to know for sure.
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