-=> Quoting Sheila King to Michael Martinez <=-
 -> You see the kinds of words you're using, though?  "Certified" and
 -> things like that.  We shouldn't have to be certified.  Things should
 -> be easily accessible, like open-air marketplaces.
 SK> Things should be easily accessible? That doesn't make sense. Some
 SK> things are a LOT of work and effort.
 SK> Take your brain surgeon example. You _say_ certifications shouldn't be
 SK> necessary. Yet, you intend yourself to verify the qualifications of
 SK> any brain surgeon before you would allow him to operate on you. Well,
 SK> in that case, you ARE requiring the surgeon to have certain skills and
 SK> competences.
Yes, *I* am requiring him too.  Other people don't have to if they choose
not to.  He takes the responsiblity for his actions, without the interference
of policy and certification, and his students take the responsiblity for
their decision to use him.
 SK> If he possesses these skills and competencies, then why
 SK> not have him thus certified?
Because the process of certification is overtly discrminatory, unfair,
and segretory because it is institutionalized.  It separates and 
encourages the separation of rich from poor, powerful and politically
competent from not, *educated* from *uneducated*.  This is done very
consciously. 
 SK> It's all a bunch of semantics, if you ask
 SK> me.
It's "only semantics" to the priviledged people.  To the people who are
victimized, and excluded from the process, recieving the short end of the
stick, it is a hard and unnecessarily unfair reality in which they have
no voice unless they satisfy certain narrow criteria (certification) which
are predetermined by other people.
 SK> Learning to be a brain surgeon is hard work, if you're going to be
 SK> any good at it, official certification or no.
Yes, that's true.
 SK> If you are good at it,
 SK> why not make it official?
The question is, WHY make it official?  Why should we make things
"official" to begin with?  I see it as a detriment to do so.  A hampering.
Something that gives very few people, policy-makers, immense control which
they employ in a manner to narrowly restrict the public in a varieity of
areas, school and learning being one.
It's like the theory of business or general captalism.  If you own a busines
and you sell a product, you must create a situation where you are 
narrowly restricting the product.  You have to charge more for the final
outcome than the labor and materials that go in to it.  I mean, that's
the whole point, or else there's no reward to being in business.  But
that's a very taught and restrictive way to do things, and kind of a 
dumb one in the long run because it presupposes that you have a limitless
supply of materials to keep putting into it.  Or to put it another way,
it's very nature operates on the principle that what you *give back*
is less than equal to what you had to *put in*.   That's an inherent
imbalance which is doomed to fail spectacularly because all it cares
about is consuming things recklessly.  This is our modern consumer society.
Well, things would not only be fairer putting Illich's ideas into practice,
but they would be healthier too, and more rewarding and richer for many
more average people.
-michael
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR]
---------------