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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> I agree with your sentiments.   I also am a product of Public Schooling, 
> but feel that I am not the brainwashed product of the same.  


Please try to excuse my crasness, Ray, but you and Gloria (with whose 
sentiments you are agreeing) clearly demonstrate the sort of brainwashing I'm 
refering to.

You view your posiive experiences in school in music and such as something 
you would not, could not, have otherwise had.  If I had taken a keen interest 
in 
music performance when I was in elemenatary or (what at the time was) junior 
high school, the ONLY outlet would have been a school music program of some 
sort. The ONLY one.

But expand your scope of this a little broader for the moment and realize 
that's because all oportunities for such things were gathered up and invested 
in 
the school systems and made artificially unavailable otherwise.  Can you 
begin 
to see where I get the 'break you legs, give you crutches, and take credit 
for your being able to walk' thing?

Think back on your governent school experience.  Suppose instead of music it 
had been fine metal working.  Did the schools provide, could the schools have 
provided, a way for you to get the same start as a metalworker as they did 
for 
your music.  No,  Shop class wouldn't have done it.  I could come up with a 
list of 500 things without putting a lot of effort into it that you would 
have 
had no potential to gain insight and experience into because you were 
confined 
in a school and your list of possible interest were tiny.

Basketball, you say?  Suppose you were in a very small schools sytem and your 
interest was scocer, chess, archery, etc.  Would you have had opportunity to 
pursue those just as you did basketball?

I myself when I was in jr high developed a keen interest in lutherie.  Can 
you imagine the potential for developing that interest and skill within the 
parameter of government school in the 50's and 60's.

Yes, of course you would not have had the opportunity for music outside of 
government schools.  That's what they were designed to do, take away the 
great 
vast universe of choices available to you and replace it with a tiny few 
choices and brainwash you to the extent that you somehow imagine that the 
government 
schools functioned to provide you with the meager choices rather than take 
way all your other vast array of choices.

A goldsmith I know does very good work and is very successful at it.  He 
learned his craft in prison.  Does it follow that going to prison in and of 
itself 
is a good thing?