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Now that I've got your attention, here's my manifesto below and on Google Docs, Jumpshare and Google Drive.

Education

New political system

Military

A couple of novel ideas

Education

Summary of new system

Schools are always open — “it takes a village to raise a child”, not a prison
Exams are available for all ages according to ability
Only yearly welfare checks are compulsory
Schools (staff and management) function according to their “strategies”, like genetics, determining: what they offer, what goes where, what staff do, the rules and purposes of rooms
“The regulator”, as I call it — the organisation above schools — collects feedback from parents and children, does inspections and collects metrics: health metrics, educational metrics, etc.
The data is used to determine the best strategies, in a process of strategy evolution, where better strategies are replicated, and worse ones are ended. Data includes long-term lifetime data
Schools prioritise practical lessons and essential knowledge
Corporations can design onboarding courses
Parents and children can use software to react to and propose edits to strategies, make short-term suggestions, and contribute financially or practically
School features: beds, community dinners, booking system (e.g. kids propose a group booking of the sports hall), official Discord server, independent study rooms
Ideally, everybody is a “responsible” of a school near them, regardless of their attendance

My experience

It's 2006 and I've started primary school. Probably on my first day, I'm given a colouring-in task, which I take as insulting to my intelligence. I'm waiting to be asked what I want to learn. I want to learn about computers and programming. I'm not asked what I want to do.

To make the colouring-in a challenge, I do it perfectly, not going over the lines. I rotate the page to make it easier for me to colour perfectly. The teacher shouts at me for that.

A few times in my school life, I thought that something was wrong with school. The slavery. It's obviously wrong.

Then, once school was done with me, and I had suffered, I thought that there was something wrong with me, and that I had done wrong. I thought my personality was too extreme.

It took me a lot of thinking and deconstructing my reality, using my brain damaged by school, to get back to what little me knew: school sucks.

It's not me who did wrong. It's school that did wrong.

I was more than once angry with school, rightly so, for the horrible way in which I was treated, as a standardised slave. But guess what? Through the routine, I became indoctrinated, and in secondary school, I looked down on the kids who misbehaved, even though my primary school self would have misbehaved if I thought I could attain freedom by doing so.

That shows how easy it is to get used to thinking that something is the way it should be, just by doing it repeatedly. I repeatedly obeyed despite my frustration with school, and in the end, I didn't applaud children who misbehaved despite the futility. Instead, I looked down on them. I had forgotten that I didn't actually like school. Instead, I had been trained to obey and that is what I expected of everyone.

I am lucky not to have been completely defeated by school. I am lucky to have this chance to defeat standardised school and the political establishment that imposes it. Completely defeated, at least one of the following would apply to me: dead, in prison, thinking there's something wrong with me, in a hospital, in a mental hospital.

Criticisms and quotes

In England, under the "Labour" party, schools have art, drama and music classes, but not building, driving or street cleansing ones. The "Liberal Democrats" "fight" for a “fair, free and open society” where nobody is “enslaved by conformity”, yet they believe in the same education system as the "Conservatives”.

Albert Einstein — someone who has done far more good for the world than any power-seeking authoritarian of the day — thought in 1931 that “individuality” is “destroyed” by the treatment of the child as a “dead tool”, "bee" or "ant". He said that ”a community of standardised individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development”. He also said “the worst thing seems to be for a school to principally work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority” as it "destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity, and the self confidence of the pupil” and “produces the submissive subject”.

“It takes a village to raise a child” (African proverb), yet schools function comparably to prisons.

From the Netflix documentary "Inside the Mind of a Cat":

"Not every cat can do special tricks. You must observe the cat to understand what she is capable of, and teach them things based on their strengths."

"When animals are born, they're born with a temperament. That temperament is the initial building blocks for that personality that's going to develop over their lifetime."

"All of our cats have different personalities and you need to adjust to them, so, you cannot make them adjust to you — it's kind of not their job, it's yours. So, you need to pick what works for them better."

"It's like with humans. Some are great at computers. Some can be great ballerinas. You wouldn't teach computers to a ballerina."

"The Savitskys don't force their performers to do these amazing stunts. Like a sculptor who finds the sculpture within the rock, they let each cat's potential reveal itself."

Why are humans supposedly being educated for their own lives being treated worse than cats trained for humans’ entertainment?

Education isn't a “right” if it's compulsory. It used to be common for children to be hit in schools for disobedience and failure to perform. The education system has not fundamentally changed since then.

Compulsory education is not “accessed” by children; it is imposed on them.

Where's the "diversity, equity and inclusion" in the education system?

Where is the "liberal democracy" in making children obey unquestioningly for their entire childhood?

Someone messaged me:

"I would overhaul the entire system to be more like a video game research tree.

They would complete an exam in say, Numeracy 4, and this would unlock Numeracy 5 and possibly other exams if they have all the prerequisites.

Students wouldn't be required to attend lessons at all if they can complete the exams without.

I personally taught myself everything very quickly and classroom lessons were a waste of my time.

All I needed was to read the textbook to understand.

Whereas there are also other students who struggle and likely won't get as far as other students.

The current system holds back a large number of students while simultaneously expecting too much of another group.

All because it insists on age discrimination and cannot differentiate based on talent or ability.

I also think that some courses can be designed by corporations as an onboarding process, students who want a career with them can complete their training system and be guaranteed a job if they succeed.

Rather than the insane system of students being trained by people who don't know anything, have no connection to any employers, and have no idea what the job market is like because they never entered it.

Comparable to a fisherman training their kids to become a chef.”

Detail of new system

Parents

Some or many parents are likely to heavily involve themselves in their children's and others' education, as well as in school activities.

It could save the taxpayer money — or free up money for specialists or other assets — if parents with nothing to do are converted into de facto school staff.

When a child is conceived, they are considered a “responsible” of a school — with data on the new life counting toward regulation, and with the school therefore interacting with the mother. This protects the unborn and should take the weight of affordability off of new mothers.

With that said, schools should avoid finding themselves burdening the taxpayer with costs for raising children that nobody — not even the offspring themselves when they are adults — is willing to cover.

Therefore, reasonable responsibility has to be put on parents, with responsibility increasing for each additional child.

A school would only go over budget — spending more tax money than allocated to it — if it had to, to meet basic needs. It could be a problem if a school's money, wherever it comes from, is increasingly spent on basic needs, with less and less to spend on quality of life and learning. So, it matters who is contributing more and who is receiving more.

Children

The typical school experience, from the perspective of the child, involves:

Signing up for and attending classes and activities
Receiving communications and advice from the management
Sitting exams in accordance with their ability and interest
Experiencing random visits from regulator employees (inspectors and data collectors) who will quiz them on the functions of the school and seek to build their official profiles (like CVs) by recording evidence of their abilities, knowledge and health status
Being prompted weekly to give feedback on their school via an app
Using independent study areas
Considering their life path and discussing it with the management, so that they can be best supported and understood
Reviewing their schools’ strategies and making suggestions
Using software to indicate approval and disapproval of strategies, suggested strategies and short-term suggestions
Using software to indicate intention to join in on proposed group activities, making them reality when approved by the management

School operation

School is not about attendance; it’s about outcomes. Attendance doesn’t necessarily equal outcomes, so school staff shouldn’t worry about attendance. Regardless of attendance, each child should have a school that is their "responsible school", which is judged on data regarding that child.

Schools are open 24/7, so children's potential studying/sporting/etc time is not limited, and so they always have a place to go. Of course, not every part of a school needs to be always open — there are diminishing returns — but it's not as though school facilities are only useful for a portion of the 24-hour day. There are beds for children who find it convenient or preferable to sleep at school. Schools host community dinners, and have parts for independent study, for tutoring, and for learning in groups of everything from a few to a few hundred. A booking system is used and applied to activities as suited, so, for example, if a child wants a seat in an independent study computer room, they need authorisation. Or, if they want to attend a class, they may need to take a test, so the management is sure they're suitable for it. Children and parents can message and book meetings (if not randomly show up) to talk with the management. The booking system is available for staff, children and parents as an app and website. Children, parents and staff can propose bookings to the management. For example, a group of children might see that the sports hall is not booked for a certain time, and propose a group booking to use it for a certain activity. The system shows what is planned so that people can join in. Each school has an official Discord server (for everyone involved, including parents) — Discord being a versatile and broadly used communication platform.

All school employees need to provide, for the regulator’s use, 50+ words of written or spoken (as speech can be converted to text) recollection for each hour worked. Recollections need to be made and sent no less than daily. An eight-hour shift would require at least 400 words, ideally covering every hour of employment.

Headteachers are on a social network where they can communicate their ideas and experiences with other headteachers as well as the regulator.
There needs to be at least three people that the regulator knows are the management, one of them being the headteacher.

The management generally does not work from home, but is physically present in their school.

Schools cooperate to provide a wider range of facilities and opportunities. What I mean by this is, for example, a child's responsible school is the closest to their house, but since a few other schools are also very accessible, they can help each other. For example, school A accepts school B's responsibles to use a climbing wall, and in return, school B accepts school A's responsibles to use their trampoline park. This gives each school's responsibles access to both a local climbing wall and trampoline park, whereas they may have otherwise had access to only one or neither of these. It's a win-win.

Schools seek to fund things through donations, which could both limit the need for taxation and extend what they can offer.

Schools are "responsible" for certain children, but it's not like they must ban people once they reach eighteen, especially if that would not only backfire regarding data from them, but also not even be related to better data from the children of the school.

The practices described don't have to stop at schools. They can be used for community centres, generally. Ideally, everyone will have one or more community centres that cater to them, meaning that, for example, someone who turns sixteen or eighteen and finds themselves with limited access to the school they attended, will, at the same time, have expanded access to a different place and other opportunities. There will be natural separation of age groups and of the sexes, and, to a lesser degree, other demographics, but it should be natural, according to what works, which is what produces better data. So, instead of just having mixed-sex schools and single-sex schools just because people thought they're good ideas, you'll have mixed-sex and single-sex stuff based on what actually produces the most bang for the buck. So, no more ideological laziness. Power actually has to serve the people. To serve both the individual and the community is not necessarily easy, but that's what must be done.

While a school (or community center) will have "responsibles", who are the people it, by default, needs to provide services and access to, and are the people whose data is collected for regulation, it can provide services and access to anyone — in accordance with its strategies, of course. This means that a school might, in practice, appear to serve the whole community, even though its "responsibles" are not the whole community.

Let’s just merge “school” and “community centre” into one word, that being “school”.

Given how big schools are, and how many rooms they have, and given the ideal that everyone should be a responsible of a school/community center, a physical school's management could be split between two teams: one focused on data from its responsible children, and an additional one focused on data from everyone else in its catchment area. Schools are big and expensive, so it will take a while to build new ones specifically for adults. The less that demographics need to be separate for the best data, the less that this will be on the agenda.

Many small contributions will come from the school community itself, but occasional big contributions can come from farther away, for example, from rich areas to poor areas. It's much nicer to donate to something specific that you like than it is to pay tax for many things that you do like as well as many things that you don't. The farther away people are, the less they're relevant to a school, unless, of course, they're offering something rare. So, a channel needs to be open for outsider contribution.

Each school keeps an inventory of its property, in which individual products and items, and their condition and location, are recorded and updated.

The regulator

Metrics to collect include reported happiness and successes of former students, and the dental health and memorisation abilities of current students, to name a few.

The only thing that should be compulsory for the child is a yearly welfare check from the regulator, taking place in their responsible school. The welfare check should be the start of a yearly data collection process by the regulator. They are asked to participate in health checks and a demonstration of their knowledge and skills: the child chooses from a list of available tests to take, and can also demonstrate their abilities open-endedly.

With that said, seeking data from each child more often than yearly may be worth more than it costs, or spreading out the data collection might be more effective than proposing all the testing at once. Data collected from the regulator can be turned straight into data available for employers and other educational opportunities.
The child can choose to make their profile discoverable by employers, and can edit what is visible to employers. Assuming full data collection acceptance, their profile will contain a lot of information not included in CVs, including allergies and intolerances, Human Benchmark scores, VO₂ max, grip strength, and videos of them doing things.

Data collection acceptance should itself be a metric by which schools and strategies are judged, but they shouldn't be judged harshly if children decline to participate in loads of testing beyond the basics.

The regulator should, with video evidence, get to know each child in terms of their educational and non-educational desires and interests.

Data collectors show up to schools unannounced and wearing headcams which are livestreaming to regulator offices. Their full interactions with schools are recorded for maximum evidence. The regulator interacts with responsibles, seeking to build their profiles.

Frequent and unpredictable data collection is important, because then you know people aren't just cramming and forgetting.

While a school's staff may remain the same for many years, a school should not have a consistent set of inspectors and data collectors, thereby limiting the potential for fraud.

School staff can certainly collect data for the regulator, but it would be second to unexpected data collection.

Surveillance cameras would be useful for inspection and data collection in certain areas. For example, a powerful camera in the gym hall records someone's amazing basketball performance, and the regulator puts a clip in their profile.

The regulator can be invited to certain areas for data collection, such as a home or swimming pool.

One type of data collection is for kids to be able to log in to a website, using their face as ID, and start answering questions and doing tasks.

Screen recording is another data collection method, which can be used in conjunction with face-ID to confirm that someone is using a computer and performing their activities.

An inspector would livestream themselves checking for hazards, checking that things are functioning, and looking around so that the actual condition of the school can be compared to the strategy document, and checking that planned activities are taking place as expected.

Data can be turned into points or percentages for categories and subcategories. For example, one school might have a "strength" score of 150 while another has a "strength" score of 100, because the "responsibles" of the former are physically stronger.

Schools and strategies aren't the same thing. You can’t just assume that because a school has good data, it means it has good strategies. Good data could be because of individual staff or environmental factors.

The data collection and inspection activity that a school experiences are variables to strategise with.

The regulator keeps an eye on schools' purchases and intended purchases to see if it can offer to bulk-buy things to distribute to schools, saving them all money, though spending their budget. It might be awkward if you had, for example, one school bulk-buying something to distribute to itself and fifty other schools, and having those fifty schools pay the one school.

The government should make and maintain a publicly available website full of learning and activity materials and recommendations designed for all audiences. The three audiences are schools, individuals and non-school teachers (such as parents). Therefore, it should have lesson and activity plans, and recommendations for schools, for example, library book recommendations. Individuals should be able to access the website to consume the learning material, guidance and activity ideas at their leisure. Parents should be able to access resources to help them raise and educate their children.

Feedback

There is a feedback app and website as follows:

Someone can log in and give feedback (in the form of ratings and comments) regarding a school they have interacted with. Parents should also be able to give feedback on any schools their children have interacted with. Each child will have one default school, which they can give feedback on, which is their responsible school, but they may interact with other schools, particularly during multi-school events. Each time a child interacts with a school, it gets added to the list of schools they can give feedback on. The regulator, every Sunday, prompts everybody (in the form of an app notification or an email) who has a responsible school to give feedback on it, including parents, though feedback may be given anytime. One can give feedback on the school as a whole and also on individual staff members, including management. Feedback is timeframe-based, meaning that you can give an all-time review or feedback that applies to the past year, month, week or day. One can give a rating without a comment, a comment without a rating, and specifically a suggestion. You can, for example, send feedback which is about a particular staff member, about the past week, including a rating, including a comment, and check a box to indicate that your feedback includes a suggestion. You are able to indicate who you want to be able to see your feedback — for example, only the regulator, or everyone, including the general public, or somewhere in between. Once someone has experienced a school or otherwise interacted with the activities of its staff, they are forever able to provide feedback on their experience, and are periodically prompted (e.g. every five years, if they are of middle age) to do so. The feedback service uses facial recognition checks to reduce the potential for non-genuine feedback.

When feedback is sought from adults regarding the schools they had interactions with in their childhood, that is accompanied by seeking metrics. "Metrics", like literacy, and "feedback", like review scores, are "data", in this context, which is what's used to determine good strategies and judge schools. Suggestions aren't this type of data, but are nonetheless important.

Core education

I see core education as "dangers, places, communication". Basic numeracy falls under "communication". What a shop is, and what a court is, and how they work, and where things tend to be, and the very basics of the solar system, and the places on the Earth, fall under "places". Water currents, pathogens, electrical risk, first aid, etc., fall under "dangers".

As a baseline educational data collection scheme, every seven-year-old and every fourteen-year-old should be given an age-appropriate Dangers exam, Places exam and Communication exam.

Of course, exams aren’t enough. The full spectrum of testing, including exams, is enough — though exams are not essential.

Financial incentives

Children may be offered payment to participate in data collection.

If a school implements a new idea which is found to lead to better data (feedback and metrics) across schools, then the pioneers could be financially rewarded, including the staff who first enacted the policy.

On the one hand, financially incentivising staff and management to get good data could be very powerful, and on the other hand, everything is relative, which means that rewarding positive data could backfire by encouraging keeping strategies secret that lead to better data. "Positive" data is really just "better" data, and it's easy to see that someone might try to remain "better" than others for the money. It shouldn't be that keeping an effective strategy secret is more financially appealing than properly documenting it.

Pay may be influenced by feedback, for example:

A staff member with an average rating of 10 (since their last payday) earns twice as much as one with an average rating of 5. Whole-school ratings primarily influence the management's pay, and only somewhat influence staff pay.

Strategies

The education system needs both innovation and stability. Freedom (of policy) is needed for innovation, and restriction is needed for stability. The restriction is needed in order to lock in successful policies once they have been discovered through experimentation.

Strategies encompass every identifiable, replicable thing about a school. They are to be acknowledged and then written as strategies, in the format below, if not first written and then enacted.

This includes physical things and also the behaviours of the school staff and management.

It is the school management’s job to identify and write existing and emergent strategies of their school. The management may read other schools’ strategies and is mandated by the regulator to enact certain strategies. The management doesn’t add or remove strategies without the regulator’s approval.

An example strategy:

1. furniture for casual use

2. sofas, bean bags and sofa chairs, with accompanying low tables

3. at least one room on all floors for this purpose, and a corner of the lunch hall

4. [room numbers] and the south-east corner of the lunch hall

5. [specific products] for [room number]

[specific products] for [room numbers]

[specific products] for the lunch hall

It’s debatable whether that strategy is fully replicable.

An example strategy:

1. auditorium

2. in the middle of the main building

3. blue cushioned lift-up seats, black curtains, overhead lighting and speakers on the stage

4. [number of seats, room dimensions, stage dimensions, etc.]

An example strategy:

1. teach cycling

2. road rules, safety tips, cycling itself, bicycle maintenance

3. use videos, school-owned bikes and equipment, books, meet mechanics

A strategy can, instead, take the format of a flowchart, with upper levels branching down, allowing for several separate items on the same horizontal level.

A strategy has at least one part, and can have technically any number of sub-strategies, which go into detail about how exactly the top-level strategy is done.

The origin (level 1) strategy can be a vague and basic statement. Origin strategies are the most replicable because they are the least specific. A strategy (all parts considered as one) can descend through levels into greater detail, so long as a school could, in present or in future, replicate the strategy.

Each strategy has a time aspect, which is one of the following:

currently implemented
work in progress
within a year
within five years
dreams

Each strategy has a type, which is one of the following:

fixed
movable
internal
external

“Fixed” means “fixed things”. For example: carpeting, building layout and material, tennis court.

“Movable” means “movable things” that one or two people can simply carry or push to another part of a school. For example: indoor plants, books, tables, screens.

“Internal” means practices that, by default, do not involve the responsibles of the school, like the management's hiring practices, routine meetings, how staff and management interact, staff roles — replicable, not regarding specific staff.

“External” means practices that are, at the origin, about what the responsibles experience, like farm visits, handwriting lessons, messaging, what parts of the school are for what and how each part of the school is managed in terms of their rules and purpose.

Strategies are for the long term, so 'monthly cinema visits' with a paragraph of detail could be a strategy, but to watch a certain movie—one-off—is not a strategy.

It may be better if origin strategies are very broad, for example, "sport" or "STEM", which branch down in massive flowcharts, including within them different types and time aspects. The level directly under "sport" would contain, for example, “competitive” and “non-competitive”, with both “competitive” and “non-competitive” branching into their own “group” and “individual” parts.

Example parts:

• group jogs and races

• team dodgeball

• library

• kitchen

• canteen

• water top-up tap accessible from each part of the school

• hiking

• daily 2-minute one-to-one checkups

• computer science

These could be parts of strategies or origin strategies.

Example broad origin strategies:

• sanitation and hygiene

• social support

• safety

• food

• employers

• woodworking, metalworking, construction and manufacturing

• music, drama, art and creative crafts

• biology

Example strategy, including time and type info:

1. take steps to achieve better air quality <internal>

2. optimal window ventilation <work in progress>

2. portable air purifiers in key areas <within a year> <movable>

2. upgrade HVAC <within five years> <fixed>

The regulator keeps a history of all strategies and their related data. It does this by keeping, along with each responsible’s profile, a history of all the strategies they have experienced. Data from that person is considered related to the strategies they experienced.

There is to be a software and an app for strategies, in which strategies can be viewed collapsed to the origin, or expanded as desired to lower levels.

A school's strategies should be viewable to those involved so that they can verify its truthfulness, gain insight, react to it, make suggestions and offer to contribute to plans.

Strategies, and suggestions for strategies, should be viewable through an interactive interface with these three broad categories of interaction options: approval indication, communication, and contribution. Approval indication means liking/disliking. For example, you might like someone's suggestion to add a certain object to a part of the school. Communication means that you can comment on things in the Reddit/Facebook format, which can lead on to discussion in the Discord format. Communication might itself be suggestion, in which case you could see someone's suggestion both when specifically looking at suggestions, and also when looking at interactions to the strat doc — that is, if their suggestion is to remove something from or edit something in the strat doc. Contribution is split into two types: payment and enactment, with subtypes "on the table", "full" and "limited". "On the table payment" would mean you're putting money towards something but it will only be taken if the full cost is met and the thing is actually implemented. "Full enactment" would mean you're willing to do a thing entirely yourself, but not necessarily pay for it all. "Limited payment/enactment" would mean you're willing to contribute or pay for some of the thing to be enacted or purchased — possible when something is variable, as opposed to either entirely done or entirely not done. "On the table enactment" would mean you're putting yourself forward to do something, but only if others do too, to meet the requirements of the thing. "Full payment + limited enactment" would mean you're offering to fully pay for and partially do it. For example, if the thing is "five mesh office chairs with headrests in room B32", it says you're offering to fully pay for it, and you'd somewhat involve yourself in the process of getting the chairs there. "Payment" just means that your money is used or sent for someone to use, it doesn't mean even buying anything yourself.

Someone submitting a suggestion should be encouraged to provide an estimated cost for its implementation. Prominent suggestions to suggestions should be nested under their parent suggestions. For example, someone suggests something, and someone makes a suggestion for the suggestion, which gets a lot of likes/dislikes, so it's shown under the original suggestion.

You should be able to apply interaction to auto-generated interaction sections, and also be able to highlight text/media to apply interaction to. For example, there might be something in the school's "works-in-progress", and you only disapprove of a specific part of it, so, instead of applying a dislike to the whole thing, you can select specifically what you dislike.

Anonymity and visibility options should be available for interactions and suggestions, with the strictest visibility setting being that only the regulator sees your interaction/suggestion.

Not all suggestions will be suggestions for the strategy document. As well as a system to interact with the strat doc, and to interact with suggestions for it, there needs to be an interaction system for short-term, one-off suggestions.

When a new school is built, the regulator might have deeply prepared strategies for it, or might give a lot of freedom to the management to develop their strategy document for a month before the school opens. That would be a site-first approach, as opposed to total strategising, in which the fixed physical things are purpose-built for certain practices. One new school might have an experimental design based on suggestions and ideals, while another might just be built to replicate existing success. Schools are generally be built according to connections found between existing schools' fixed physical things and their data (feedback and metrics). For example, it might be found that yellow paint is better for maths classrooms — but only if other conditions are met. Countless correlations can be found, and different successful strategies may emerge, allowing for different types of schools, much like how evolution results in different adaptations depending on the environment. A school may require different strategies if generally successful strategies aren’t successful as expected for that school. The regulator may have some schools update their strategies quickly, according to what appears to be the latest great innovation, while having other schools play the long game, waiting for more long-term data, ensuring that strategies are adequately explored.

An example of a practice which would count as "internal" is cleaning the school. In Japan, the kids clean the school themselves, I heard. With this document system, children can read and understand the functions of the school and a kid could use the interaction system to offer to do that practice, for example.

Another example: A company might see that the management plans to resurface something, and offer to do it cheaply for brand recognition.

The benefit of a school's document and suggestions being broadly visible to the public is that people from far and wide could offer big contributions.

A significant strategy for each school is its strategy regarding the flow of people in and out of (and within) its building(s)/premises, in terms of how controlled and monitored it should be. An app, using location services, can help to keep track of who is where, but the main solution, replacing manual logging by employees, is to use facial recognition cameras for this. Because of different strategies, one school might have staff act as receptionists and ask people where they're going when they enter, while another school uses AI to watch who enters and keep a list of who is on site.

What a strategy document is optimising for is a variable. Certainly, more than one metric must be optimised for, but whether to value one metric more than another is up for debate.

As an advanced practice, strategy documents can be made which optimise for certain metrics, resulting in specialised schools. Then, beyond someone's responsible school, they can opt into types of specialised schools, but this is a relatively playful idea for the far future.

An idea

Everybody can get an advanced, ultrathin and soft (and therefore very sports-friendly) smartwatch which connects to the school's booking system, alerts the user about their upcoming bookings, can tell the user about the booking status of rooms, can be spoken with to discuss upcoming events, make suggestions and opt-in to activities, and can be set to suggest opting-in to potential activities.
The user can choose for the system to automatically attempt to book them into regular activities.

The management can instantly, or with delay, communicate with the user through the watch. For example, the management leaves a message for the user, and the user puts on the watch after waking up, if they aren't already wearing it, and then receives the message as text, a voice recording, or text-to-speech.

New political system

The currently operated methods for distributing political power have not yet produced an education system that makes sense. I assume that they will remain ineffective regardless of the effects of a proper education system. It seems that the power-seeking aren’t suited to properly using the power they seek. The highest power held among humans should therefore not be held by anyone who sought those positions. I understand that there are varied reasons for seeking a position, but I also understand that political power excludes those who lack the time, will and capacity to seek it. Rather than political power being something that people seek, it should be something that seeks people. This is easier said than done, but I have designed a selection process.

Because of delegation and vetoing, the highest power doesn’t have to be anywhere near a full-time occupation. It also doesn’t require specialised knowledge.

A number of people (e.g. 1% of the population, though ideally everyone) are randomly selected and put into proximity-based groups (e.g. of ten people), and those groups vote for their favourite person in the group, and the favourite people get put into proximity-based groups, and the process continues until there is a final favourite person. In each round, the number of votes someone gets is multiplied by the round number, determining how many points they gain.

Someone's points after an election is their "voting power" until the next election, which is the amount of weight they can throw behind a political proposal. Favourites are able to pool their points for and against proposals. With enough support and not enough disapproval, a proposal can be implemented.

Regarding the election process: The groups are facilitated to communicate and meet up before voting. Group members participating in communication are all expected to vote, so they are disqualified if they decide not to. The randomly selected people are automatically put into groups, which means someone could be voted into power, in their absence, without even knowing they had been randomly selected. By default, information on them is given to their group members, so that they can make informed decisions to vote for them. Regarding group size: I imagine 10 people per group as the default. A group size of, for example, 100, would require more meetup time. Whereas a 10-person group could do with a 15-minute meet, a large group would spend hours together, likely eating together and going through a sequence of social activities.

Elections are be a process of finding, connecting and filtering people. The more people that are randomly selected, the better, because the bigger the election process will be, relative to the population size, and therefore, the more that useful ideas and people will be drawn into power. No segment of the population (e.g. children, prisoners) should be excluded.

Given that the voting groups are proximity-based, the election process starts local and then zooms out and out, connecting people from farther away. Someone may, for example, have "their" street favourite, neighbourhood favourite, town favourite, regional favourite, etc. Local governments can be made out of this, and there can be a hierarchy of governments. A favourite will primarily concern themselves with the area that voted for them.

Using their political responsibility, officials may delegate a lot. It is up to them how they want to approach their authority. They could perhaps remain anonymous and make big decisions without even their family knowing, and take a laid-back approach, only chiming in occasionally. Or, they could do the opposite, and gain a following, and spend a lot of time meeting people and involving themselves with things.

Two extra practices to maximise the likelihood of great governance:

Trust score: There is a website up (but not during elections) where, everyone, by default, has a trust score of zero, and you can search someone's name, and you can't see their trust score, nor your own, but you can influence their trust score using your 100 influence points. You could for example, influence person A's trust score by -50, and person B's trust score by +50, and then you have used all your influence points. The only time you can see someone's trust score is if you have the opportunity to vote for them. So, in addition to being facilitated to meet the people in your vote group and seeing official info on them, you can also see their trust score. When you log in to the trust score website, your previous allocation is not shown. You can simply make a new allocation. Therefore, even if someone got your password and logged in to your account, at least they cannot see if you trust them or not, or who you trust/distrust. You could, for example, allocate 40 trust points to person A, 20 points to person B and -40 points to person C. How secret trust scores should be is something to consider.

Governance penalty/reward: Before there is a new election, the public is given the opportunity to vote on if they think the government made things better or worse. If they think the government made things better, then those in government (those with the most voting power) should be financially rewarded in accordance with their voting power and the degree to which the public thinks they made things better. If the public thinks the government made things worse, then they are punished by time in prison — with those with the most voting power spending the longest time in prison — up to a year — or longer if the public thinks they made things a lot worse.

This major public vote is multiple choice, as follows:

• I think they made things a lot better

• I think they made things better

• I'm not sure / I think things aren't better or worse

• I think they made things worse

• I think they made things a lot worse

Military

"Service" and "duty" are suspicious word choices, surely intended to prop up morale. I believe that, like the education culture, the military culture is overly concerned with looking good and producing submission. It's not concerned enough with soldiers being of good health, strength and character. Taxpayer money is wasted on fancy uniforms and medals, singing and dancing, and pomp and pageantry, with surely no regard for whether that's what soldiers even want. I believe that, for all that elaborate dress codes and other practices of arguable utility may "maintain discipline", they equally result in the abuse being passed on, resulting in war crimes, far from disciplined. To coordinate men of high morale is preferable to disciplining men of moderate to low morale. To discipline is only necessary in response to cases of failure to follow meaningful standards. Funny hats, salutes...all of that stuff doesn't matter. It's bloatware. What matters is saving the innocent. There's organising and guiding, and then there's domineering. Given that the education system is domineering, surely the military system is, too. "War is the time of the active and courageous, and not of the clean-shaven." — Yevgeny Prigozhin, in criticising Russian military discipline. Supposedly, such discipline is useful for "creating the mental framework that enables soldiers to follow orders under extreme stress" — Claude. What extreme stress? Why do they need to be under extreme stress as opposed to having fun? If they're under extreme stress, they shouldn't be "serving" and doing their "duty" in the first place. Someone is not fit for combat if it stresses them out. Being active and courageous makes one much fitter for combat than looking neat. The education system does not enable that kind of activity and courage.

If a state “needs” to conscript, that is because it is abusing its own people — just as a happy family does not need internal coercion to defend itself from a home invasion, for example. It is not impossible to make such a happy family. It is not impossible to make a similarly happy nation.

People who accept conscription are simply so used to big fish eats small fish, and so hollowed by humanity, that slavery is acceptable to them. It is basically slavery. Slavery was gotten rid of in the past, and then, guess what, it clearly wasn't needed. We can do it again.

Also, for a government to advertise it s military to its citizens is like a supermarket stealing potential customers’ money to advertise to them. The state should be in alignment with the people such that advertisement is not considered. If a leader has a number of soldiers they want and they aren't getting the desired number, it would be best not to try to manipulate their own people into getting them to join the military for the sake of a higher number.

You don't need to manipulate people into doing what is best for them.

My vision for military activity is one of campaigns — towards world peace, security and advanced civilization — that are joinable not only by professional soldiers. They should wear cameras so that people can learn from their footage and to deter criminality. Returning combatants should have access to living quarters specifically for them. All this should be voluntarily funded. There should be a social media connecting funders to fighters and connecting jobseekers to opportunities.

A couple of novel ideas

There shouldn’t be shops with constant misleading "sales". A company shouldn’t be selling things at a "discount" half the time, or have big intrusive "SALE!!" signs. Black Friday weekend this, Cyber Monday that, sale countdown timers....Stop. Be civilised. Constant sales = worse quality. Looking at you, Proviz. Not very “pro”, is it?

People should not be bothered by door-to-door salespeople, "junk" mail, and so on, so, nobody should have notices by their doors saying that they do not want these. It should be illegal to do certain door-to-door activities at addresses that are on an opt-out register. People should be able to opt-out of certain types of door-to-door communications, and opt-out of door-to-door communications from certain organisations.

Table of Contents

Education

Summary of new system

My experience

Criticisms and quotes

Detail of new system

Parents

Children

School operation

The regulator

Feedback

Core education

Financial incentives

Strategies

An idea

New political system

Military

A couple of novel ideas

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