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by crawfordcomeaux 3015 days ago
I'm choosing to not enroll my future children in the education system or capitalism, for that matter, for exactly this reason.

My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.

2 comments

When you make a policy of about avoiding the education system and then you use “there community,” it kind of weakens your point.

And capitalism? You aren’t going to enroll them in capitalism? How’s that work? You’re not going to let them buy things or work for money?

Before you try to “facilitate” education for your future children, it might be a good idea to facilitate your own education first.

Thanks for pointing out the autocorrect issue.

I'm going to explain to them there are other ways of meeting human needs, like developing a supportive community among people who all help each other. I'll also minimize the things we use money for, as well as the ways we bring money in. There are already groups online geared toward this goal, such as Buy Nothing groups. This is how capitalism will start to be phased out and how I intend on doing my part.

I'll also teach them to realize sometimes forgetting to proofread is not an indication of being uneducated.

This comment also got my interest. What exactly will you do to educate your child? What do you mean by not enrolling them in capitalism? Will your primary focus be on programming skills for them?
I'll educate them myself. I'm currently looking to design a lesson plan built around songs with lyrics encoding the lessons. I'd also like to design the interior of my home to help them develop intuive visualizations of concepts.

Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity:

• goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically

• is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do.

• changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system

• is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves

• is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life

• periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from

• old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages

• can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level

• can learn through our example

• can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary

• is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal

The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...).

I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world.

If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way.

Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.

You're making a massive bet on your own ideas being right (and useful): learning what is normally taught has at least been proven out to keep people off the streets. We don't actually have the "freedom from money," so you'd be in a pretty bad position if you had no idea how to get it.

(note: if you have a trust fund set up or something, then I guess it balances out. Just get ready for them to rebel in their teens by becoming neoliberals and putting up posters of Henry Kissinger on their walls.)

You may be right. And while we may not have the freedom from money enshrined in current laws, money is not a human need, so we have an inalienable right to choose whatever strategy we want, as long as it doesn't harm others.

Ultimately, for the time being, we can only seek to minimize how we interact with money until the law catches up with human understanding. It's really hard to dump capitalism altogether and/or overnight, so it's about progressively stepping down/back.