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> Then, why is it "Children's?", you might ask. Because it is operated by the schoolchildren, 9-15 years old.

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/

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These children were mostly railway workers' kids. Whole purpose of it was to teach them railway jobs were cool to make them follow their parents' steps.

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.

You’d be surprised but Deutsche Bahn fit the description as well.

Can we find similar ideas in the way Samsung is run ?

I think many huge corporations start building their own resorts, housing, hospitals, etc. I mean, you can practically live at Google campus, right?

All self respecting industry operations in Sweden (steel, wood, papermills, weapons) had their own seaside resorts for workers from about 1920 to the late 1980-ies. Most had housing and company clinics too. Some of these companies were state owned, some in private hands. It all ended when the world went stock-market crazy and the maximize profit guys started to "core-business" the industries, and colsolidation started.

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.

Railroad police certainly is fairly common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police. I think that’s because their operation stretches over all kinds of political boundaries.

(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)

> 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,

Other large enterprises in the USSR had similar things, to one extent or another. Railway police are common in other countries.

It's the railways in the US that have their own private police force. Soviet and Russian railways had/have dedicated departments responsible for the railways within the larger national police force, because otherwise local police departments along the route would have to coordinate train-related crimefighting themselves.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Railway_Troops have position/separation greater than elsewhere.

For other oddities, USSR has army, navy, air force and anti-aircraft branches.

> My 30 year old masters students are not even allowed to run their own WiFi network

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?

> 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 :)

I'm way too much of a simpleton to comprehend your philosophical musings of cosmic proportions, but this I know: students should not be in charge of the WiFi or anything else network related at an academic institution. This is a job for professional, dedicated IT staff.

I'm not following. Are you in favour of letting children operate trains or against it?

The GP was saying that comparing the children's railway to IT limitations preventing graduate students from running their own WiFi networks is absolutely ridiculous. University IT has lots of good reasons for centralizing the administration and allocation of WiFi networks that have nothing to do with "children" (30 year olds) not being "respected"

Railway networks have many reasons to not let children run a rail line. I realize there are reasons and arguments for the default position, but well... these are arguments for the default position.

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.

Pretty obviously I'm the professor, right? The assignment is WiFi AP points and attacking authentication. It's in the syllabus (signed, sealed and approved all the way up to VC). Attacking the institutional access points would definitely not be okay. Where do you suppose professional, dedicated IT staff come from?

Look, I'm sure whatever beef you have with IT staff and admin policy is completely well-founded. But comparing the children's railway to IT limitations preventing graduate students from running their own WiFi networks is absolutely ridiculous. University IT has lots of good reasons for centralizing the administration and allocation of WiFi networks that have nothing to do with "children" (30 year olds) not being "respected". The fact that you can't get an exemption for your practical lab assignment is ridiculous, sure, but it has nothing to do with "children not being shown respect" and everything to do with how large bureaucracies behave in general for any institution, not just universities.

This is a complex area that I can't sensibly respond to in this forum. But JFYI I have written counter-policy documents and popular articles [1] that sparked investigations into how ITC is managed in educational institutions.

Things do need to change.

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...

That article doesn't say anything about wifi networks, or about why you wouldn't be able to setup an isolated lab for students to try out attacking access points. And for such an isolated lab (no internet access is required), I can't imagine a university IT department having to be involved except possible to request that the lab have isolation to prevent the APs you're using from interfering with theirs.

So this may well be true; certainly there are places where IT is incompetent and admin is... unhelpful. However, as someone who has been IT and who went to a school that had a... "fun" time with wifi[0], I can assure you that letting just anyone run a wifi network can have some fairly nasty fallout when they all fight over the same 3 channels and nobody can actually use wifi at all. Further, unless the students in question are actually doing a computing program that includes wireless network as part of the curriculum, it's not part of "the education they paid for", it's a service that the school should be providing (and yes, in the case of finite shared spectrum, imposing a monopoly on). If it's a computing masters program that includes networking, then yes of course the school should arrange a lab environment where the students can mess around, and the above only applies outside of that environment.

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.

I worked in IT at a state university and they were quite competent overall, many had done computer science research at a graduate level.

Why would you consider the management of an academic institution "shadow" power? It seems pretty clear they are the "actual" power, nothing hidden about it.

Here's a couple of detailed and quite challenging videos [1,2] to help you understand, in words far better than I can offer, why the present governance structures of universities are widely regarded as illegitimate by some of the greatest minds who work in them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5EWYohECRQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANdhnoAadZk

The responsibility here is to give rides to other children. It is not used for real transportation needs.

Responsibility refers here to is transporting actual humans (that will die or will be maimed in case of an accident).

In this sense yes. The phrase "real passengers" can be interpretted differently, more seriously.

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.

> 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.

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.

0: http://www.indoctrinationmovie.com/

> Not to cast stones here, but organized religion isn't big on teaching critical thinking either.

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.)

The list of scientists, authors, and innovators who were not only Catholics, but Catholic priests is enormous.

Maybe you've met some dopey religious folks, but don't paint with too broad a brush.

Yep, and a lot of them lived back when being accused of heresy by the church was literally a death sentence. So again, not exactly an environment that fostered critical thinking, certainly one that punished speaking out against the church in any sort of way.

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] .

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Death

Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, for disobeying a direct order from the pope to tell geocentrism and heliocentrism were both possible.

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.

Thomas Aquinas (just to name one) was a scholar of the highest order and was absolutely not just pretending to be a Christian. It’s a strange worldview to imagine that Christianity provided no academic contributions to the world. To some extent, it invented academics. This is more or less z

I am not a Christian and was for a long time a fairly militant atheist - but this point is historical fact.

I don't think that this fact some how dismisses the likelihood that many people throughout history merely pretended to be Christian simply to avoid being burned at the stake.

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.

while these are interesting points, both posts are strongly euro-centric.

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.

Many people, yes depending on how you define many. But majority or them? No.

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.

Isaac Newton clearly defies this theory. He dedicated a significant portion of his time to exploring religious ideas that practically made him a heretic. He would have had a lot less conflict with the church if we was just an atheist going through the motions, rather than a true believer with his own unique interpretation of the scriptures.

Religion is a human need - maybe not an obvious animalistic one but because it crops up with every civilization, I think it isn't something on the outside, it's something within us.

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.

The current belief in "The Simulation" has all the trappings of a newly forming religion.

Religion is far from a universal biological need. The proof of that is in the huge rise of secularity after (i) we began to rationally understand the universe, including deep questions such as how our bodies minds work, the origin the universe, etc, and (ii) religious freedom meant people could freely reject the dominant religion and not be killed for it, which is usually a pretty strong motivator to "love" the dominant religion.

Thomas Aquinas was a theologian, working purely within the circular Christian scholastic system to talk, essentially, about nothing. Where he did talk about concrete things (ethics, politics, even economics) he simply argued based on his religious dogmas. Meh, not very interesting.

> 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).

Galileo didn't get in trouble for his theories about the Earth and the Sun, he got in trouble for making theological conclusions from them, and for being an utterly insufferable douche who also managed to personally piss off the pope.

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.

And for example scientific foundations for Big Bang were put by Belgian priest and treated with suspicion as too consistent with world as created at some point.

> 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?

> The Libertarian movement is inherently individualistic.

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.

What you describe may very well be a valid definition of "Libertarianism," but Libertarianism's modern form (at least in the United States) seems to fundamentally rely on the belief that individuals are on equal footing with megacorporations and that therefore removing restrictions on said megacorporations will result in them acting in ways that are better for society rather than worse.

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.

Yes, unfortunately "Libertarian" in the US is a synonym for anarcho-capitalist.

Those people would have a stroke if they knew what Libertarian used to mean in the 19th century... ;)

"The Jungle" is a work of fiction written by socialist Upton Sinclair who was pushing his platform. It is evidence of nothing whatsoever, much like the Star Trek Federation utopia.

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.

Catholic scientists, quite a list:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scie...

It probably meant that the railway was for kids as passengers.

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.

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