Uneducated and Docile Citizens

[Guest guest]

I attended a seminar a few years ago (can't recall the speaker's name) but

he essentially said these things. I am an unschooling mom. My children were

long ago pulled from that hive.

 

 

*°º°*~Michelle~*°º°*

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

A very good article.

 

If you wish to see other data from this site it is http://www.thememoryhole.org

 

Much love,

Pamela

 

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like

clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in

pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the

percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of

the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.

Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded

classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their

fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared

up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.

 

How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school

system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute

classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization,

lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who

designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the

late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.

 

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to

obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the

New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of

the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce

conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love

of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig

into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.

 

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the

localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually

teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads,

to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, " We believe that

education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting

itself among the laboring classes. "

 

By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of

schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher

and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:

 

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the

maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social

growth.

 

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the

future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories " in

which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished

products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing

will come from government and industry. "

 

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of

numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:

 

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding

hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character

education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good

will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people

or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.

We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of

letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor

lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample

supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize

children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and

mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

 

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889

to 1906, wrote:

 

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in

prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an

accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined,

is the subsumption of the individual.

 

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:

 

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly

places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature.

School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

 

Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a

speech to businessmen:

 

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very

much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education

and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

 

Writes Gatto: " Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard,

said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about

'the perfect organization of the hive.' "

 

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the

change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been

demanded by " certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the

nature of the industrial process. "

 

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an

educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough

to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the

sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good

worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of

the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could

continue running things.

 

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a

blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind

it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within

education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

 

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy

labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy

didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed

with me. However, she added, " They told us at the state conference that our job

is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to

not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real

world. "

 

 

John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An

Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford

Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It

is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You

can order it from Gatto's Website, which also contains the first half of the

book online for free.

 

The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent book

Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York:

Continuum Publishing Group, 2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Celebrate 's 10th Birthday!

Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web

 

 

[Guest guest]

wish a lot more parental units homeschooled.

i am a dropout from a young age..am now 36 and

strugling to pass the g e d so i can work for the

local del plant. thats probibly the only way id be

able to get my own comp. shrugs.

lonnie

--- primalmommieto5 <primalmommieto5

wrote:

>

> I attended a seminar a few years ago (can't recall

the speaker's name) but

>

> he essentially said these things. I am an

unschooling mom. My children wer

> e

> long ago pulled from that hive.

>

>

> *°º°*~Michelle~*°º°*

>

>

>

>

> [Non-text portions of this message have been

removed]

>

>

>

>

 

 

 

 

 

 

Celebrate 's 10th Birthday!

Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web

http://birthday./netrospective/

[Guest guest]

Dear Lonnie,

 

I just wanted to mention that many adults have

undiagnosed “learning disabilities” that make taking a

test like the GED very difficult. They need to ask

for “accommodations.”

 

Approximately 15% of people have learning disabilities

that make book learning hard. They tend to be very

bright students but they cannot read easily and they

have trouble writing.

 

Sometimes they don’t hear what was said, or don’t see

what was written on the board. They may have skips in

their perception. When they read, for example, they

might miss a word, then skip a line. When they spell,

they skip letters and forget how to spell common

words.

The public school is not able to accommodate students

who need smaller, quieter, self- paced programs. Often

teachers do not believe the student has a disability

and the teachers offer little support or

understanding. The public school often drives these

students out believing the student has an attitude

problem.

 

Homeschooling is often a good decision, if only to

take a break for a year and get caught up.

 

Videos from the library often provide the same

information as books.

 

Most textbooks can be found on tape recording from the

Books for the Blind.

Perhaps GED textbooks can be obtained on recording,

too. Ask if there are GED practice classes online or

cassettes you can listen to while driving.

 

Also, computers can be set to read the text aloud.

 

If you find reading is very difficult and seems almost

impossible, it could be you have a disability. If you

often spell words wrong, this is a good clue that you

have a disability.

If your handwriting is really sloppy, this is another

clue.

 

Ask at your community college or doctor if you can get

tested for learning disabilities.

Changes can be made to allow you to have more time

taking your GED, for example.

 

Learning disabilities are just as real as other

disabilities, but they are hidden. I think it’s

important to ask for help. If you can get tested by

your doctor or school, this will give you a legal

right to some “accommodations.” These accommodations

can also be provided if you continue on to college.

 

The GED is very hard if you have trouble reading

because of a disability.

 

I’m not saying you have this problem, but just wanted

to mention that it is very common. There really is no

known cure except to try to work around the problem as

much as possible. In a way, it’s something like

needing glasses. Unfortunately, we don’t have glasses

for learning disabilities.

 

I wish you the best of luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Celebrate 's 10th Birthday!

Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web

http://birthday./netrospective/

[Guest guest]

Oh how true.. My son is a very bright and focused individual. But I learned

towards the end of his 3rd grade year that the teacher was more or less

shoving him in a closet all day to get him out of her hair and when confronted

told me " You asked that he not be placed in a high traffic area, I was simply

complying with your request. " (pretty snarky huh?)

And this was just the beginning of my problems with the very school system

I was working for at the time. I had teachers who disregarded medical

documentation and told me " he has no ADHD, he just needs his butt spanked and

everything will change " or " perhaps if you were a better mother, he'd fair

better

in school " . I battled for 4 long years and then I pulled him out. Today he is

on his way to becoming an architect. A goal he set when he was 12

Michelle

 

In a message dated 3/5/2005 2:25:44 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,

glkbreeze writes:

 

The public school is not able to accommodate students

who need smaller, quieter, self- paced programs. Often

teachers do not believe the student has a disability

and the teachers offer little support or

understanding. The public school often drives these

students out believing the student has an attitude

problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

I do understand that it's the governmental system.. thus the point of the

original email concerning the REASON they developed our system. However, people

are people. There are good people and bad and this includes teachers. And no

amount of funding can change a person's personality.

 

When a parent has requested a 504 plan for their child.. and been refused

because the vice-principal decided SHE didn't believe the child had this

medical condition despite years of documentation from various professionals..

that's not government. That's a vice-principal who doesn't want to be bothered.

When a teacher is asked to place a child out of high traffic areas due to his

distractibility level (in other words, please don't sit him near the fountain

or sharpener) and she chooses to stick him in a closet; this is not government

... that's actually abusive. And when a teacher has been asked to make minor

accommodations (don't sit in high traffic area, contact me if his makes below

a " B " so that I can help him, give him transition warnings) and she refuses

or just ignores them until the report card shows up with straight F's... This

isn't government either.. it's a teacher who doesn't want to take 2 seconds

for that child. And that's wrong.

 

My son has had some wonderful teachers.. Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade..

he had amazing, loving, concerned teachers who understood (through training or

personal experience in their lives) how the mind of the ADHD-child

functions. They made his schooling experience a wonderful one. But more often

than

not.. the above scenarios are what we encountered.

 

Personally, I don't believe in sending little ones off all day anyway. I

brought them here into this world..it's my job to raise them. Not someone

else's. So my 5 children are where they should be.. at home with me doing the

natural thing.. unschooling, sometimes referred to as natural learning. And

they

have faired well to say the least. I have one studying massage therapy, one

looking at architecture, one headed off to opera camp this fall because she is

an amazing singer and wants to perform opera. ..and two little ones on their

way up I think nature has dictated well if we just listen.

 

Michelle

 

 

 

 

Moderator's note: This is exactly what I was talking about. The parent can see

their own childs needs but not the school as a whole to help bring about a

better sytem with parent involvement, etc. The sytem will contiue to deteriorate

just as the government intends it to do. If people keep drinking the kool-ade of

right wing propaganda so be it. I do not have much hope for the enightenment of

our society.

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

The school situation is very dificult for students, parents and teachers.

 

The trend for the last 20 years is for government to talk big about

education and how it cares for students (similar to health) but their

policies have usually been directly opposed to what platitudes they

are saying. They have sqeezed most of the resources or underfunded

them terribly, they pile tons of government requirements on teachers

and school systems. The system is sqeezed from the top down and the

shortages and deficiencies that results are less than desirable for

the students and their parents. The goverments then shift the blame to

the teachers and administrators and they call for more government

requirements that put more demand upon an underfunded system which

causes more problems. The students and teachers are the point of

contact where the two forces of the system come into contact and where

they meet. The downward pressure from government and the upward demand

from parents. If you want adequate schooling for your childern it is

the same story as most other areas of your lives. You have to make the

politicians really care about and fund good schools, not just

political BS. Most parents do not understand what is happening so they

only blame the teachers.

 

Much more is called upon to be a responsibility of the school than has

ever been before. Many parents do not have sufficient parenting skills

and then the lack reflected in the children is put upon the teacher to

correct. For many it has become a low paid thankless job.

 

My youngest daughter is a kindergarten teacher in the midwest. She

always wanted to be a teacher, she put herself through school, works

long hours, puts in almost half as many hours after school as during

school, has a large class size, does tons of governmental

requirements, pays $1300 a month in child care expenses for her two

children (3yrs and 8 months) so she can teach. Her salary isn't big,

she pays payments on her student loans on top of every thing else.

 

She has to be involved in most of her students lives whether it is

part of the school program or not. She has helped with health care,

clothing, nutrition, abuse, funerals, etc., etc in addition to what we

think is normal school activities. She worries about each and every

one of them in her class, sometimes it seems more than the parents do.

All the while making her class a loving fun place to go to where they

can learn to love to learn.

 

So it is easy to blame it all on the " teachers " but that doesn't

always make it so.

 

We have poor schools, libraries, social services, etc. because it has

been governmental policy for 20 years to defund and destabilize these

things.

 

Frank

 

 

 

 

,

primalmommieto5@a... wrote:

>

>

> Oh how true.. My son is a very bright and focused individual. But I

learned

> towards the end of his 3rd grade year that the teacher was more or

less

> shoving him in a closet all day to get him out of her hair and when

confronted

> told me " You asked that he not be placed in a high traffic area, I

was simply

> complying with your request. " (pretty snarky huh?)

> And this was just the beginning of my problems with the very

school system

> I was working for at the time. I had teachers who disregarded medical

> documentation and told me " he has no ADHD, he just needs his butt

spanked and

> everything will change " or " perhaps if you were a better mother,

he'd fair better

> in school " . I battled for 4 long years and then I pulled him out.

Today he is

> on his way to becoming an architect. A goal he set when he was 12

> Michelle

>

> In a message dated 3/5/2005 2:25:44 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,

> glkbreeze writes:

>

> The public school is not able to accommodate students

> who need smaller, quieter, self- paced programs. Often

> teachers do not believe the student has a disability

> and the teachers offer little support or

> understanding. The public school often drives these

> students out believing the student has an attitude

> problem.

>

>

>

>

>

>