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Big time bravo on the bureaucracy piece! You getting through that without quoting Illich mirrors the restraint of a Spin Doctor not inquiring the time. Good work.

This issue of bureaucracy, as you know, is the acid I'm refluxing in education. Standardized testing. Increased class caps. Data driven curriculum. Skills based literacy. "Common core." Automated grading. Online classes. It's all a means of managing numbers--even at preschool levels. Authentic education requires identity and story--the collision of actual beings in actual spaces with actual timelines containing memory and hope that create interpretations of both the material and the actors. We can no longer be so bothered. Rather, the intelligence presented by America's public education system, via means listed above, has already been an artificial one for decades. When we aim to make technology more sentient than the youth ("For bureaucracy to continue, further rules--but not further living people--are necessary."), we've surely tossed our offspring to the Baals.

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