Both the American and Soviet governments knew that building up their respective political systems, their economic prowess, and their international influence required first, as historian David Raleigh writes, “educating the builders.” As a result, soon after the Second World War, American governments and educational experts begawan unprecedented effort to direct the reform of schooling at every level across the country. Doing this, however, required dramatically increasing government and expert (especially administrative) control over schools, privileging this over parental rights and influence. … from roughly 1920 to 1945, the leading lights of American education had wished not only to mold society through schools but also to require that teachers exert tremendous personal effort to adapt to the local needs of their classrooms (as they saw them), even to the point of writing textbooks to suit their own students. In other words, while schools had been moving toward expert control in those heyday years of progressive education and teacher professionalization, they did so with a profound respect for the importance of school and community ties and of teacher autonomy. The much more radical transformation from local to large control that occurred in the 1950s and ‘60s was a different thing altogether. This change was born not out of a lack of interest in local influence but out of a pressing fear that without a nationally overseen education, the next generation of Americans would not be able to defeat the Communists as their parents had defeated the Nazis. And now the transfer of power from ‘lay citizens to elite decision makers in government,’ as Joseph Murray has written, was moving forward far more rapidly.

the family is the primary educational delivery system. … In fact, John Holt responded to the Reader’s Digest article with a letter encouraging the Moores to take their criticisms even further. Many readers, both famous and less so, agreed that the home and family were the best available setting for alternative education. And so parents, not teachers, would have to lead the way.

… we can say with some confidence that while the desire to educate children religiously played a (sometimes highly important) part in a large number of homeschoolers’ decisions to homeschool in the early twenty-first century, the overall motivation of homeschoolers as a group was almost certainly not primarily religious and has grown to be less so over time. As numerous of the NHES (National Household Education Survey) reports have repeated, ‘parents homeschool their children for many reasons that are often unique to their family situation.’ Thus, although a majority of homeschoolers were religious—as were a majority of Americans overall, let us not forget—religiosity did not define homeschooling whether in motivation or demography.

Perhaps most intriguing is data form the ACT college entrance exam on homeschooler performance. The ACT released a report in 2020 that made composite scores from public schoolers, private schoolers, and homeschoolers available over the previous two decades. The ACT’s main finding was that between 2005 and 2019, homeschoolers’ composite ACT score was significantly above that of public schoolers (and slightly below that of private schoolers): homeschoolers’ average scores have been consistently higher than those for public school students. While private school students scored even higher than homeschoolers, the difference between homeschooled and private-schooled kids was much smaller than between public-school children and homeschoolers.

A different sort of writer than myself might have wondered why the author of the pages in the briefcase had gone to such trouble to invent a duplication of what was already available to him: why should he have invented the racecourses of New Arcadia when he could have bought a racehorse for himself and watched it of a Saturday at Mowbray or Elwick. I have always been interested in what is usually called the world but only insofar as it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world. I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists.

In June that year, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI to reboot its AI efforts for a whopping $14.8B, and brought in Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang to take over Meta’s AI strategy. [...] Based on the investment made into Scale AI and Wang, it’s pretty clear that Meta — and Zuckerberg — is determined to build a state-of-the-art LLM that can be competitive with the latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT. But Meta has to start pretty much from scratch, and it’s up to Alexandr Wang to deliver. [...] Zuckerberg has full control over the business, and has made the decisions to reallocate a good part of engineering folks to data labeling, to roll out tracking software, and to lay off 10% of staff when Meta achieved record revenue and profits. As the CEO, the buck clearly stops with him. But it’s hard to unsee that — outside of layoffs — everything that Meta is doing is taken from the Scale AI playbook, and that surely comes from Wang.

Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous. For two centuries from roughly 1650 to 1850, poaching (of wood, game, fish, kindling, fodder) from Crown or private lands was the most popular crime in England. By “popular” I mean both the most frequent and most heartily approved of by the commoners. Since the rural population had never accepted the claim of the Crown or the nobility to “the free gifts of nature” in forests, streams, and open lands (heath, moor, open pasture), they violated those property rights en masse repeatedly, enough to make the elite claim to property rights in many areas a dead letter. And yet, this conflict over property rights was conducted surreptitiously from below with virtually no public declaration of war. It is as if villagers had managed, de facto, defiantly to exercise their presumed right to such lands without ever making a formal claim. It was often remarked that the local complicity was such that gamekeepers could rarely find any villager who would serve as state’s witness. [Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, page 11]