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What if everything you thought you knew about education was wrong?

What if students learn more quickly on their own, working in teams, than in a classroom with a teacher?

What if tests and discipline get in the way of the learning process rather than accelerate it?

Those are the questions Sugata Mitra has been asking since the late 1990s, and for which he was awarded the $1 million TED Prize in February at the TED2013 conference.

Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, won the prize for his concept of “self organized learning environments,” an alternative to traditional schooling that relies on empowering students to work together on computers with broadband access to solve their own problems, with adults intervening to provide encouragement and admiration, rather than top-down instruction.

Watch Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize talk …

The 5 Most Ridiculous Things People Tried to Patent

Creating something new is hard. It’s certainly much easier to patent things that have already been invented, which is exactly what these people did. …

Libertarians and War: A Bibliographical Essay

The relationship between war and libertarianism has interested me since 9/11. In the aftermath of those terrorist attacks, I witnessed in grim fascination many libertarians make excuses for government in the realm of national security. The proper libertarian position on war has become a matter of controversy, although I believe it shouldn’t be. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne said, as well as being “mass murder,” in the words of Murray Rothbard.

The following essay presents some of the most relevant materials and readings on this controversy. …

Declassified: US Government Colluded With Big Banks to Monitor, Disrupt Occupy Protesters as ‘Criminal Threats’

According to recently released documents, the federal government monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement from its very inception, internally referring to it as a potential criminal and terrorist threat despite acknowledging the movement’s explicit rejection of violent forms of protest. …

30,000 Golden Dawn Supporters March in Athens Under Neo-Nazi Banners

Tens of thousands of black-clad neo-Nazis have rallied in Athens in support of Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party, in the movement’s biggest show of support since it emerged from obscurity to win 7 percent of the vote in last June’s general election. …

[“Why go to bother of spending time and money reading about world history, when we can just wait for it to repeat itself for free?”]

The people of Grassy Narrows have sustained themselves for thousands of years on their traditional territory – 2,500 square miles of forest, lakes, rivers north of Kenora, Ontario.  Now plans for clear-cut logging, mining and the legacy of residential schools, hydro damming, relocation, and mercury poisoning threaten to uproot their way of life. 

Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not Even A Bee

… There were no bees. The air, the ground, seemed vacant. He found one ant “so small you couldn’t pin it to a specimen board.” A little later, crawling to a different row, he found one mushroom, “the size of an apple seed.” (A relative of the one pictured below.) Then, later, a cobweb spider eating a crane fly (only one). A single red mite “the size of a dust mote hurrying across the barren earth,” some grasshoppers, and that’s it. Though he crawled and crawled, he found nothing else.

“It felt like another planet entirely,” he said, a world denuded. …

Poison As Food, Poison As Antidote

Those who see government power and corporate power as being in conflict, and those who seem them as being in cahoots, each have a point. The alliance between government and the corporate elite is like the partnership between church and state in the Middle Ages: each one wants to be the dominant partner, so there’s naturally some pushing and shoving from time to time; but on the other hand the two parties have a common interest in holding down the rest of us, and so the conflict rarely goes too far. The main difference between “left-wing” and “right-wing” versions of statism, as I see it, is that the former generally seek to shift the balance a bit farther in favour of the state (i.e., toward state-socialism) while the latter generally seek to shift the balance a bit farther in favour of corporatism and plutocracy. (In the U.S., the reigning versions of liberalism and conservatism are arguably both more corporatist than state-socialist; but the liberals are still a few notches farther toward state-socialism than the conservatives are.) …

Lessons for Building a Co-Operative Movement

… Cooperation is the basis of human society. However, most societies today have been deformed and oppressed by small authoritarian groups for a very long time. But the dynamics of cooperation do not die, because they are so essential to a decent life. I would say cooperation is the norm because it can be suppressed but it cannot be destroyed. The essential concepts of cooperation are instinctive to most people, particularly when they are young. Look at the way kids get together in the park and organize a game. Or groups of musicians get together regularly as improvised cooperatives. Or young parents form play groups for their kids. In all of these situations people spontaneously self-organize activities based on freedom, direct democracy, and a general equality. Many people only experience cooperation outside of their work lives, in their private lives, with family, friends, and associates. But cooperative instincts always remain there inside the human condition like seeds waiting for the right conditions. When an oppressive society reaches a dead end, a new generation rejects the dying husk and reinvents its world, and that creative act is always based on mutual aid and cooperation. …