This new understanding suggests that the mix of dharmocracy, theocracy, oligarchy, and democracy may be followed by new social/political systems. We might call this new system 'cosmocracy.' It could be a more fruitful form of human control. Individuals empowered by new scientific knowledge and new technologies, can cooperate directly with one another, at the community level in the production and distribution of goods and services. Community cooperatives could exchange with one another on a global level. Cosmocracy would not be bound, as are oligarchy and democracy, by the space/time limits. Today we can know what's going on in any part of the world in real time. No matter where we are we can converse with anyone in Uganda, Iraq, or Nepal on our cell phone. Our reliance on any bosses, governments, corporations, or boundaries is ephemeral. We have the ability to form communities with others to control our own lives and to have an effective voice in our own governance. The question is now only one of will and wisdom.

Whether we can take advantage of the possibilities is the crux of this forum -- Freedom and Education. When material production was the primary need of society it was important to train willing workers for service and factories. In the 1840s the compulsory state school system was established to transform an agrarian society into a industrial one. The influx of immigrants searching for industrial jobs extended the value of the system. Authoritarian hierarchal, competitive schools locked young people in the most formative years of their lives away from family, society and nature. It trained them to obey authority, to work by the bell, to learn what was determined by others, and in general to fit into an authoritarian, hierarchal, competitive, materialistic society.

For years social scholars like Froebel, Goodman, Illich, Holt, Godwin and others have promoted deschooling society. But the time, space and technologies prevented the fruition of their ideas. Today cyberlearning, learning cooperatives, unschooling, homeschooling, charter schools, independent study programs, Learning centers and many other personalized learning programs are laying the ground work for Cosmocracy. Life-long self-learning has many parents. The mainstream society is still captured by the educate/teach/school syndrome of a passing age. Its call to fix-the-schools is a march to folly perpetuated by the system itself.

The task for this Forum should be "What can we DO to help promote a deschooled future?"

In my humble opinion Bill Ellis