A regular political conversation and making-progress get-together, followed by a friendly social dinner for those that have time to stick around. This is an opportunity for you to listen to what other people are thinking and to share your ideas. Discussing problems and opportunities and establishing a flow of concrete action, making change happen and transforming society together.
English, Français, Deutsch, with translations as needed.
Wednesday, December 5th, Espace Noir, rue Francillon 29, 2610 St-Imier, Switzerland
The conversation will start at 18:00 and a dinner will be served at 20:30.
On Wednesday, December 5th we will most likely continue to talk about the education system in various different aspects. This topic emerged from our second session last week:
We started out asking ourselves how society would have to operate to address the concerns brought up by our first session on November 7th. It was suggested that the society's education system would be of central importance.
These statements were made: We need better schools. Schools are too regulated, with not enough attention to the individual. There needs to be more freedom, and more motivation on the part of kids.
The example of 'circus schools' in St-Croix was mentioned, an affordable system where kids go in the late afternoon to learn and practice circus skills.
Providing such complementary education of various types could offer a way forward that would potentially be easier to implement than changes to the public school system or attempting to offer an affordable alternative to the current public schools.
We started to investigate these various options in more detail. The option of an alternative school would be harder to accomplish, but it allows the kids to bring their whole energy to the better system. The option of changing the public school system would require a very extensive effort. It was suggested that, since the current public school system is a reflection of a consensus in society to the extent that such a consensus currently exists, making changes would require shifting that consensus. On the other hand, enhancing the education by offering complementary education in the late afternoons would be easier to accomplish, but much of the children's energy would be used up in the mainstream schools.
We noted that identifying an ideal alternative system would be a huge topic. One suggestion was that a parents' collective might be a good starting point to make an alternative affordable.
It was also mentioned that mainstream schools are too competitive, recalling experiences with grading on 'the curve' in the past, for example, which guarantees that some percentage of kids "fail".
There was also a bit of a side discussion, regarding an individual focus vs. a collective focus, as an alternative to existing hierarchical systems of decision making. And a bit of an ontological discussion, such as whether 'the market' is a meaningful concept.
We closed the session with identifying several loose ends that we would want to pursue. We said that one promising approach for a complementary education offering would be in the context of community gardening, for which there would be existing local opportunities that could be acted on. We also wanted to find out more about the circus school in St-Croix and look into the arguments that have lead to recent attempts of "free school reform" failing in several cantons.
For the next session we intend to share our research in these regards. So, it seems likely that we will continue our work along these lines on Wednesday, December 5th 2012.
Ringo is a CommonJS-based JavaScript runtime written in Java and based on the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine. It takes a pragmatical and non-dogmatic stance on things like I/O paradigms. Blocking
and
asynchronous I/O both have their strengths and weaknesses in different areas.
Its aim is to provide an off-browser JavaScript platform that has the right mix of features and simplicity to be pleasant to work with and easy to deploy. The primary goal is to build a stable, high-performance runtime for server-side use. The following code is all you need to create a simple web app:
Simply save the code above as "server.js" and run it by executing
ringo server.js
. Like most Ringo apps, this app will automatically reload, picking up any changes you make without requiring a restart.
But Ringo lets you do more than write web applications. It allows you to seamlessly use any Java class or library simply by dropping it into the classpath. This makes it easy to integrate Ringo into existing Java environments and reusing existing Java code works without lots of effort or porting issues.
Wie schon oft steckt die globalisierte Konsumgesellschaft wieder mal in einem Nahrungsmitteldebakel. Dass die Grossverteiler von Migros über Coop bis Aldi & Co wacker mit profitieren ist nicht neu.
Weil es Alternativen dazu gibt, gründen wir die Swiss Foodcoop Genossenschaft. Swiss Foodcoop
www.sfcoop.ch
Wenn wir in genügend InteressentInnen finden, können wir lokale Vertriebstellen aufbauen. Kurz zusammengefasst die Vorteile: Produkte aus lokaler Produktion direkt von den Produzenten (nicht nur Nahrungsmittel); Ausschalten des Zwischenhandels und daher markant günstigere Preise; Selbstbestimmung der Produkteauswahl.
Die Aufbauarbeit von der Swiss Foodcoop wurde von einem eigens dazu gebildeten Verein, der als Einkaufsgemeinschaft in Zürich Wiedikon aktiv ist, geleistet.
