Re: a program in networking…

There are a lot of practical life skills (e.g. professional networking, financial planning) that get ignored by schools, leaving kids to learn from their parents (many of whom are absent or clueless about these topics). It can be hard to work build awareness of these issues in the school, with so many topics competing for classroom time. I’d be happy to transform high-school “civics” into the study of how people actually can make a living in our society, rather than the current BS about Congress and the President. The sad thing about history classes (in my experience) is that they work forwards “from the beginning” and tend to stop about one generation prior to the lives of the students … these classes rarely address the institutions and practices that define contemporary society; instead, they dwell on issues that are the most distantly removed from the lives of the students.

I figure that these issues are ignored both because textbooks are unavailable, and because there are ongoing controversies surrounding those events. Another reason is that powerful interest groups want to keep the rif-raff ignorant — take for example how various clubs of capitalists have attacked “labor studies” programs around the country.

As for studying subjective thought…

I think it’s actually “objectivity” that we need to study. People need to understand that it is something that we create, not the intrinsic way that we live/think. It’s just an issue of understanding that it is an ideal that we will never reach, and not something that we can take for granted.

(p.s. I though you had a good comment over on my blog [it was emailed to me], but I don’t see it now. Did you delete it?)