Children's Railways of the Former USSR
dzd-ussr.ru
dzd-ussr.ru
This blew my mind, and immediately made me think of John Taylor-Gatto [1] who won numerous teaching awards trying, but ultimately failing, to convince American teachers to show children the same respect.
My 30 year old masters students are not even allowed to run their own WiFi network never mind an actual RAILWAY NETWORK that carries real passengers.
Going way beyond Montessori's philosophies, Gatto (and similarly Sir Ken Robinson) insisted children should learn real life skills by being given responsibility. His methods were revolutionary and transformed some of the worst New York schools. This scared the living shit out of governors and politicians who realised such a radical agenda might create young adults able to think and politically organise.
[1] https://www.diygenius.com/changemakers-john-taylor-gatto/
Because they're students, or because IT doesn't want random people running their own networks that are halfway part of the school's systems but independently administered?
IT people have nothing to do with it. They just peck at webmin interfaces and pretend to understand what Microsoft tell them to do. If it were up to IT they'd just grunt and shrug, and the students would get on with it.
Decisions to directly counter to the core mission of the institution and stand between students and the education they paid for are way above IT's pay grade. For that we have a special class of random, low skilled people with an over-inflated sense of themselves called "policy makers" - a different cadre of unassailable, unaccountable centre of "shadow power" IT guys can only dream of :)
Of course WiFi admin is different from rail transport from farm management, etc. That doesn't negate the fact that they're also similar in some respects, and affected in similar ways by prevailing culture and attitudes.
Things do need to change.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
EDIT: [0] Although actually thinking about it now, I think the primary reason that policy was enforced had more to do with that letting people set up their own WAPs would undermine the 802.1x user<->IP mapping and the security folks had opinions about that. Dorm wifi was a mess because the sheer number/density of clients was awful regardless, but allowing just anyone to fight over channels would have made it even worse.
Can you provide any examples of this? I'm skeptical of this claim given that Gatto was a prominent Libertarian, which don't really believe in political organization. The Libertarian movement is inherently individualistic. Not to mention his work with a Christian documentary about children failing to learn about family and God in public school[0]. Not to cast stones here, but organized religion isn't big on teaching critical thinking either.
I can't find any quotes or responses from a governor or politician that supports your characterization of his work.
Some kinds of critical thinking are totally encouraged in eg some forms of Judaism and Christian Protestantism. (I don't know enough about other religions to comment.)
Maybe you've met some dopey religious folks, but don't paint with too broad a brush.
Galileo, for example, was condemned on his death bed by the pope and buried in an unceremoniously small room next to the novice's chapel for almost 100 years before he was reburied in the main basilica[0] .
This was actually the best scientific conclusion at that time until Foucault proved that the Earth was rotating two centuries later.
Actually, the worst enemies of Galileo were the Aristotelians which teachings were not based on religion. They used the inquisition to stop Galileo.
source: same wikipedia article.
I am not a Christian and was for a long time a fairly militant atheist - but this point is historical fact.
That's what organized religions did/do to non-believers. They burned them at the stake. Or stoned them to death, Or drowned them, or exiled them.
If your goal is to make contributions to society, in that context you're damn well going to say whatever you need to say about your personal beliefs to ensure that kind of shit doesn't happen to you. Hell, even if you don't care about making contributions to society you're still gonna say what ever needs to be said to ensure you don't end up burned at the stake.
The end result of all these theistic threats is that a lot of people who made great contributions to society did so under the auspices of religious organizations not because they genuinely believed in the tenants of those organizations, but because they had to.
And those organizations made those threats, and continue to make those threats because they know that this is the outcome -- that people will do things in their name to avoid the shit that the religion can do to them.
It's a racket, much akin to the mob coming up to a shop keep and telling them that it would be a shame if something were to happen to their business if it didn't have some kind of 'protection' that the mob can offer them.
It's no coincidence that the Catholic church and the mob originate from the same part of the world.
Religion was one of the stronger organizing forces of the old world and so good and bad both have roots in it. It was more stable than the leadership of kings/queens/chieftans which was blood-run and disrupted by the murder of either the existing leadership or the entire bloodline. Chaotic at best.
Learning/education has been shown to be part of religious teachings long before JC was even a discussed historical figure. For example, Buddha taught under Bodhi trees, Hindu philosophers under Banyans and so on. All kinds of 'modern' conceptions came from religious individuals, because most everyone was religious. It was deeply intertwined with early culture and simply belonging to a given geo-community
Our rejection - and I do mean our - of religion and easier coexistence culturally as atheists and agnostics is relatively recent.
But, no, in general people in the past believed their own religions. We are atheists culture and large atheist traditions at this point, we have hard time imagine it.
Wheather you think it's a means of social control, a way to create distinct in-vs out group, a means to cope with death or whatever you attributes you give to it..
Just because you can rationalise it doesn't mean it goes away.. just like you can't suppress base biological urges by "thinking them away", atleast not in the long term.
Religion just comes back up in other places in forms that don't even look like the original thing but shows all the signs of it.
> To some extent, it invented academics.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Keep in mind Christians were responsible for the destroying huge amounts of books, temples, and cultural artifacts after they took power in the Roman Empire. The amount of knowledge lost to the murderous hands of Christian monks is incalculable. It was only really after the 10th century that Christian monks began to preserve and translate the classics to Latin (the common picture we have of the monk painstakingly hand-copying the classics to preserve them).
His theories also did not have a scientific backing, given the knowledge available at the time, and were closer to wild-ass guesses that just happened to be right.
> Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre proposed an expanding model for the universe to explain the observed redshifts of spiral nebulae, and calculated the Hubble law. He based his theory on the work of Einstein and De Sitter, and independently derived Friedmann's equations for an expanding universe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Big_Bang_theory
World is not some simple.
Also, do you really need throwaway account for THAT?
Where do people get these ideas? Libertarianism is all about freedom, including the freedom to cooperate with others.
For example, a baseball team is all about voluntary cooperation for a common goal. Nobody is forced to play. Baseball has nothing whatsoever inconsistent with Libertarianism.
What Libertarianism lacks is forcing people to conform and cooperate.
But, given things such as the historical existence of company stores/scrip and the things mentioned in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I find such beliefs to be overly optimistic: we already have historical proof that companies will fail to pay workers with real money and will sell unsafe food to the public unless forced to do otherwise by government intervention.
Companies have less "freedom" now than they did 100 years ago, and we are better off for it.
Those people would have a stroke if they knew what Libertarian used to mean in the 19th century... ;)
As for failing to pay workers, or selling unsafe food, that is against Libertarian principles because Libertarianism requires government to enforce contracts, and does not allow hurting one's customers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scie...
In the Soviet Union, and to a great extent in Russia till now, railway system is very independent from the State. It's frequently called a state within a state. It has it's own power stations, construction departments that build among other things, housing for workers, their own hospitals and even their own medical schools, it's own police, their own hotels and Black Sea resorts for workers, in the Soviet times they had even their own Gulags. It's a closed-loop system largely independent from the rest of it. So they have their own take on schooling, too.
Happened that way because after the Revolution of 1917, the state largely collapsed and was unable to do shit for at least next 6-7 years. Railway had to figure out how to work on its own.
I think that capitalism was kind of hi-jacked by the money guys at that point. Lots of company towns where, if not thriving, getting along, working. Not super profitable but doing ok. Then practically overnight they turned to wasteland when the mills closed.
(Highway police (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_patrol) can have the same role for roads(
Some countries also have special electricity networks for rail, “generally […] only if the railway in question uses alternating current (AC) with a frequency lower than that of the national grid” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_power_network)
Other large enterprises in the USSR had similar things, to one extent or another. Railway police are common in other countries.
For other oddities, USSR has army, navy, air force and anti-aircraft branches.
But I am not sure the drivers are children. And even if they are, of course not the yongest ones. And if 14/15 year old is allowed to drive after getting trained, it is not a big problem, I think. In some countries 15 year olds can drive cars.
In any case, this railroad is supervised by adults. It is more of an educational establishment.
We have such a railroad here in Minsk. I never cared to visit, even when was a child. Although I briefly knew one person attending it, he was dreaming to work on railroad.
But also, in Russian language, "child" doesn't imply someone younger than teenager, it does include adolescents too. There is a distinct term for "adolescent", but no distinct term for English "kid" or "toddler" except for some regional variants.
Hence, "childrens' railway" is the most broad term for it. Also, naming it "adolescents' railway" sounded more complex in Russian, a bit awkward, and would make visitors wonder: "do they allow little kids to ride?"
Regarding running the railway, there are very strict limitations what adolescents can do and what they can't do. IIRC, they can't control the fuelling of the vehicle, and some other arbitrary operations. Probably, they can't drive the engine, but just sit next to an adult driver.
Respect for the link to John T. Gatto, he was a great thinker, I even translated one of his essays from a link posted here a decade ago.
http://www.dzd-ussr.ru/towns/gorky/foto1-eng.html
Those photos are from the late 1990s, so maybe the resemblance is intentional.
Thomas's prototype causes problems for preserved railway lines in the UK, incidentally. 'Day Out With Thomas' events (where an engine 'dresses' as Thomas to run trains) are very popular, but there are actually zero preserved E2s, so they all look a bit wrong. If Rev Awdry had picked something more common (like a Jinty[0], say) to base Thomas on, there would be loads of nearly exact copies to go around...
They seemed to do their tasks quite well. And they took them dead serius. Felt kinda strange having a 10yo in uniform with a serius face marking your ticket.
The whole facility seems to come from GDR times, and there are mountains of old rusty train parts around their depots.
In 2016, I went to an interview in their office, and the interviewer made me an excursion around it. At one place I saw big ICQ logo with sign reading "ICQ Project Department".
- Wow, it still hasn't died?!
- Shhhhh! Don't say this so loud, the guys get very offended! - said the interviewer.
The office itself was spacious, with free snacks and drinks, including free fresh juice -- I remember a perfect set of 4 people sitting together, some holding those free juices -- a guy and a girl sitting on small either couchettes or stools, and two more sitting next to them a bit higher on the window, and together looking like sat down to make promotion pictures for some sort of bar. I joked that this was staged just for me.
Then, there was a nice sightseeing place: an imposing rotating armchair next to panoramic glass, to make photos with Moscow in the backdrop. When you enter or exit the office, you walk along a tennis-field-size playground, with people playing, surrounded by a net to catch stray balls. The interviewer joked that of course all this play was also staged just for the interview.
Regarding ICQ, I guess, the project is kept by the corporation for nostalgic reasons -- it was the default messenger in exUSSR in the 90s and 00s.
It may not seem so obvious, but those who lived their adolescence through the soviet 60-80s in ussr russia are the very same cohort that now authorize the killing and the violent destruction of the so 'cherished' soviet-built infrastructure in Ukraine.
This only underscores that the children inevitably absorb the moral corruption - as the soviet times were soaked through with - just as another survival-skill no matter how it was dressed.
Fuck the dusted off soviet nostalgy - look at the present deeds!
More than that I think it is important to understand the social decisions that lead to outcomes we despise. As you say, the kids who initially ran these railways had peers or passengers who now call the shots in a society we deeply disagree with. But at the same time we can marvel at how grown up a 10-15 year old can seem while shuttling around holiday travelers.
Somewhere along the way the Workers' principles were displaced by people who sought power over them. Often it is in others' experiences that we can start to understand ourselves, whether by contrast of complement.
While it still had to be great experience (it was closed many years before I was born), it was not that complicated :)
In Lithuania this narrow gouge standard is called "Siaurukas" (eng. "narrowy") and some parts are still being operated as a tourist attraction [1][2]
[1] https://siaurukas.eu/en/history/ [2] https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siaurasis_gele%C5%BEinkelis
Except they are operated literally by the children? And many of them have 'Children's' in the name?