james bach – self ed

Great article about James here.

James has taught us so much. He’s visited us twice. Both times, it was like medicine for the soul, for all of us.

ie: p 25 of how to be a mentor:

helping us grok structure and wanted stress.

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quote below links to page on site about grades:

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more quotes:

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His book is gem. A guidebook for how to not need a guidebook. And insight into what matters. (We have extra copies he brought us if you’d like one.. email via the email button on top right of site.)

He’s now added a couple of chapters, about some amazing people that didn’t find their art till 27.

You can hear his words all over the place. Much gratitude indeed.

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Tumblr loaded with insight from his first visit:

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Post from his second:

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books link to amazon

older version                                     new version

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find/follow James many places:

http://twitter.com/jamesmarcusbach

wikipedia

find/follow James on his Buccaneer-Scholar site:

find/follow his work here:

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via kids in the lab (like Seth) .. one of the greatest things James freed them up to..

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James chimes in to an email convo with Alan Kay..

[and James has joined in: My feeling is that Americans don’t need to know much to make it work. Our problem is not what we know, but what we are. We don’t understand what it means to be a free society -this is something that must be a visceral personal understanding the reason I didn’t beat my son when he was little wasn’t because of something that I knew about kids -it was because of what I am and how I want to share that experience with him the experience of being a sovereign person. I’m challenging religious beliefs about education – I’m challenging cosmology. I remember hearing things that ticked me off, but that I later came to accept.
Plato was one of the most famous philosophers he had a theory called “forms” which asserted the there was a correct pattern for everything that existed in some sort of ideal world parallel to ours. Ancient skepticism countered that we cannot know what is right and real
The philosopher Bayle took a religious slant on that and said that we cannot know God we cannot know anything about God which is similar idea he said that we naturally learn revenge but not justice. My response to that is: “Says who?” We construct justice just as we construct everything else. The most important point I’d like to share is that we can’t know what we *need* to know if we think we know what someone else needs to know we are deluding ourselves.. all we can say is what we want other people to know what we hope they will know and that does NOT define the future of thought! Richard Feynman has a wonderful quote about this. He said we must protect the future from our present ignorance We must let the future have new thoughts
and some of those will correct our mistakes. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to learn from the past. I’m saying the past is arrogant, and must be held in check by the arrogance of the future. It’s a dialectic. I don’t presume to know what my son NEEDS to learn. I don’t even presume to know what *I* need to learn. I just decide what seems urgent or interesting, to solve problems I care about  …there’s a book called “No Sucker Left Behind” that talks about payoff, too
you know what’s really stupid about them? they apply simplistic statistics to a problem where statistics are not applicable at all
A recent study showed that every such and such fraction of GPA added on average $1000 to future yearly income well, I charge $30,000 for a week of training and that training didn’t come from any GPA what all those calculations assume: is that there is a bell curve and that you can’t control where you are on the bell curve but it’s not a bell curve and you CAN control where you are we don’t look at a jet plane and say “on average it is on the ground” “so how can I expect to fly?”we know how to make it fly. And I can teach anyone to excel once they decide to stand up and walk toward something they are curious about. “Teach” here means “demonstrate” or “emobody” or “help”.
they may not be the fastest sprinters in the world but here is the reality of life: most people aren’t trying to race with you, because they don’t care -find something you love, and then you WANT to run to it.
“need” is a completely artificial idea – we’re not talking about food and water, here
In 1870 they thought we all needed to learn Latin..NEEDED Latin.there is no need …or NEED to go to Paris – or you NEED to eat peanuts – you want to, and that’s great but it is possible to construct a satisfying life without visiting Paris
there’s another category – and this is important – there are things we don’t want, that we may even hate, but once we have them they become a defining part of us. For instance, surviving cancer or learning to play piano – this is how some people justify forcing learning on other people
but I think of it this way: My son might learn a valuable lesson in self-reliance if I dropped him off in the middle of a city and left him there without any money. Or set his bed on fire one night but those would be deeply unethical experiences to impose on him. No matter how constructively he responded – therefore, I don’t manufacture crises – instead crises happen naturally, and I help my son cope with them if he wants my help. I think its unethical to impose MY idea of what’s important on my son. I just live near him and by living near him, he sees what I do and gets involved in what defines me – that’s enough]

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