Tim May wrote... "Put a partition down the middle of a school building. One side is "Blue," the other side is "Red." " Shit. This sounds a lot like my "school of the future" idea. Basically, in the inner cities the armories are converted into "schools", with a giant partition in the middle. On one side are self-learning stations and a small number of instructors. Kids can choose to go to this side of the partition whenever they want, or never. (BUT school is mandatory from 12 to 22, and big Soylent Green-type scoops scoop up the students every morning and dump them into the school.) The other side of the partition is basically a giant gymnasium. Guards with watercannon are stationed in the balcony to break up fights. At graduation, there's a trap door on the gymnasium side, that opens onto a slide leading directly to Rikers. In the extended version, the "schools" are located out in a gulag, and students live there from ages 10 to 24. There are two jobs in the schools, one is breaking rocks, which are imported from other schools, the other is making rocks in concrete molds, which are exported. Classrooms consist of a teacher behind a plexiglass wall, giving lessons over a loudspeaker that's cranked far higher than any kid could scream or yell. Thus, classroom noise is basically eliminated as a practical concern (the teacher might also have access to watercannon behind the plexiglass wall). As for teachers, the source is clear: those that fail to graduate must teach for a period of 10 to 15 years. -TD

From: Tim May <timcmay@got.net> To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Re: Education Be For Whitey Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2004 10:34:13 -0800

On Jan 3, 2004, at 9:23 AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

...

At 10:41 PM 1/2/04 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

And until the Liberatarian utopia you speak of comes to pass,

One could close all public schools and voucher tomorrow.

I came up with a plan which is workable immediately and which does not require substantive changes:

Put a partition down the middle of a school building. One side is "Blue," the other side is "Red."

Blue and Red have different academic orientations, different goals. What the goals are and how they are set might arise in different ways, e.g., by a vote of parents, or the backgrounds of the teachers in each, and so on. Not so important. What is important is what follows.

As the Blue and Red sides evolve, with perhaps one focusing on academic excellence and the other on "social skills," parents could move their children between the sides (say, on a semester by semester basis, to reduce thrashing). As the sizes of the Blue and Red sizes change, the partition would be moved.

This gives "policy choice" within a particular school building, which is a lot less expensive than busing students long distances to get to "magnet" schools (science, performing arts, crack dealing, etc.).

--Tim May "They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote." --Rep. Ron Paul, TX, on how few Congresscritters saw the USA-PATRIOT Bill before voting overwhelmingly to impose a police state

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