Realitista

Australia's Scientologist Child Labor Camp

Right in the middle of a quiet suburb is a place where children are separated from their parents, and forced to work full time for no pay, and live in squalid conditions. Those who’ve survived this place say they were brainwashed into believing they could not leave, and that they deserved the shocking treatment dished out.

A young man who escaped the place with the help of his father, Shane Kelsey says “I lived in that garage for about a year and a half, maybe two years.”

Until just over a year ago he had never used the internet, watched television or followed the media. “You’re not allowed to read any books other than scientology books, you can’t read newspapers, no radio, no movies, nothing,” Shane said.

Shane says he was held captive and groomed to see all of us on the outside as pathetic, useless and stupid. More stories from reporter Bryan Seymour “So I lived in a garage until that got flooded by a storm, and my mum got really pissed off and said ‘what the hell’ and so I got moved into a closet. It is a closet under the stairs - maybe two metres long and a metre wide,” Shane said.

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Since 1997, A Man Has Been Digging Out His Basement Using Only R/C Scale-Model Construction Equipment

Wow, I wish I had this kind of time on my hands. But I wouldn’t spend it doing this.

A Canadian guy named Joe has been digging out the basement of his house using nothing but radio-controlled scale model construction equipment… since 1997. Yes, you read that right — he’s been digging out his basement for 15 years — with nothing but little R/C tractors, diggers and even a miniature rock crusher! Amazing.

At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls.

Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside.

Then, once it’s outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West’s reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

Lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life — Newsweek ranked it number one last year — and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland’s schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation’s education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. “Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it’s true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

“Here in America,” Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, “parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It’s the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.”

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important — as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform — Finland’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

Lots more info here