“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
John Taylor Gatto
“To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.
(writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury)”
H.L. Mencken
“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.”
Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School
If religion requires a leap of faith then evolution requires a rocket ship.
Hating being cooped up in some classroom in the late 1950’s and bored shitless I wished I could have instead been with my grandfather learning how to grow everything, raise farm animals, tell the weather, fix anything mechanical, make the best wine in town, cook the best food, can foodstuffs, hunt, learn a foreign language and get philosophy lessons from a Renaissance man. Instead they trained me to be good wildebeest. I rebelled so was noted as a ‘bad boy’. The giant Fuck You attitude I gained from it made me a success (by Pop”s scale) later in life. Thanks for nothing.
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” – Albert Einstein
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” – Albert Einstein
“What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.”
― John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
“The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate”; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing.” ― John Taylor Gatto
“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.”
― John Taylor Gatto
“I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.”
― John Taylor Gatto
“Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
One of the first things Hitler did when he came to power was to shut down the PRIVATE schools in Germany.
Great quotes. I didn’t know that about Hitler.
A great book about the Socialist Nazi party is “Rise and Fall of The Third Reich” and the left is starting to resurrect some of their evil M.O., while adding in Saul Alinsky/Marxist revolutionary tactics.
Education consists of teaching students four things:
1. Reading at the highest possible level of comprehension.
2. Math at the highest level of comprehension
3. Logic at the highest level of comprehension
4. A love of life long learning so that students never stop learning from “graduation” to death.
Anything else is either destructive, distractive or trying to force the teachers point of view onto her/his students.
Right and wrong should be taught at home.
Muck
My eldest (a female) reached the seventh grade in the public schools. We learned that there was no more savage, vicious group of predators than a pack of seventh-grade girls. She suffered a while, and we decided to home-school her from there on. My wife did 98% of the teaching.
My boy had a speech-delay; his brain worked, but for some reason his tongue refused to cooperate well with it. He was put in the slow class in preschool, which fortunately for us backfired; his teacher was a marvel, a young lady whose sad day trying to educate the truly retarded was abruptly shattered with a stunning realization: this one can learn! She grabbed ahold of my boy like he was a life preserver, cut him no slack, made him a reading / writing / ciphering machine while correcting the speech delay. He had her for two straight years, becoming slightly ahead of grade level while gaining the ability to do it himself.
The school district found it painful to maintain the slow class; after all, their aggregate test scores dragged down the school. In order to quit “discriminating” against them, the slow class was disbanded and the students “mainstreamed”. My boy came home for the rest of his schooling.
His sister earned a B.A. in English (that’s what she wanted); my boy is a senior in IT. Not bad for two homeschooled kids, one of whom was considered “slow”!
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
John Taylor Gatto
Most public school educators are zealots, fanatics just like a Middle Eastern jihadist. They don’t physically blow U up, they blow up your mind, destroy common sense and rationale. They are ideological terrorists and usually lean communist/socialist.
Luckily, they are usually clueless about economics, so I can constantly make jabs at public schooling while I teach. The kids get a kick out it and I do too. My opinion is get rid of public schools, give everyone a voucher for the $ the state would pay out to send your kid, and let people send them wherever they want. A free market in education, educational freedom. Leftists hate those words. Freedom?
What U talkin’ `bout Willis?
“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
In economics, 1 big thing killing the USA and most of the Western countries is a more modern take on the quote from Tacitus. I’m taking some of what the great Ron Paul talks about: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws, certifications, licenses, permits, taxes, and regulations.”
~ The great philosopher Ronus Paulis aka Libertarianus
U can’t do any fucking thing in the USA without the permission of government, which produces nothing. Similar to the Ayn Rand quotes about having to get permission from The State to earn. Also similar to The Bible’s “Mark of the Beast” needed to conduct trade.
The US economy became extremely Soviet-like and centralized under Saint Obama, the One who must not be criticized.
Muck, if U could do those things, U’d make a great teacher! U’d also probably face a lot of jealousy from the other “educators”.