Ex Sedda – from the chair

Here are a few images of Matteo’s models he did in Google Sketchup using Bonnie Roskes’s books.

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I’ve loved using Sketchup^W program from their first version, long before they were acquired by Google. I always thought this was the perfect tool to teach kids basic CAD skills as well as some basic geometric concepts. Earlier in this school year when we decided to homeschool Matteo I decided to incorporate Sketchup into our curriculum. Each Friday we have a Sketchup session and our son loves every minute of it. Google Sketchup is entirely free and it can be downloaded at http://sketchup.google.com . Fortunately there are also excellent books by Bonnie Roskes that can teach your child to love using Sketchup by drawing fantastic objects. There are three levels of instruction: basic, intermediate and advanced. Matteo is currently using the third book of the basic series. To find our more about Bonnie Roskes’s books visit http://www.3dvinci.net/ .

I am finding out that getting back into the groove after a decent holiday break can be a bit difficult.

I finished reading Weapons of Mass Instruction a couple of weeks ago.  Gatto indirectly explains the deterioration of our democracy and commonwealth. It is often said that in order for a democracy to work we need an informed electorate, but it seems to me this is highly insufficient; at least as “informed” is currently understood. What is needed is something that used to be taken for granted – capacity to think for oneself. It really matters less what one ends up with and more that those thoughts and ideas are arrived at by one’s own thinking. Gatto insists there is a hidden aim in the mandatory public education which was deliberately designed into the system early on. At first I was struggling with accepting fully this premise, but I am now convinced Gatto is right. The vast majority was to be dumbed down by design because it was in the interest of elites to have citizens who do not ask unnecessary questions about the order of things about them.  The system did not need self-employed and thinking people; it needed to create uprooted lumpen proletariat as mass labor for the factories and pliable consumers of goods they did not need. The system delivered both.

One question remains in my mind. Does the current system still deliberately or consciously work on dumbing us down or were the processes unleashed in the early stages so well incorporated into the system that they still continue to deliver the same results even if we are completely unaware of them? This question is just the matter of my personal curiosity. The end result is the same.

You don’t need to buy the book to learn  from Gatto’s wisdom. There are many of his videos available on Youtube. Here is a result of a simple search:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=John+Taylor+Gatto&search_type=