John
Taylor Gatto
What does the school do with the children?
Gatto states the following assertions in "Dumbing Us Down":
1. It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble
of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from
the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills
almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something,
only to forget it again.
2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3. It makes them indifferent.
4. It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It makes them intellectually dependent.
6. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant
confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
7. It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are
always supervised.[9]
Everything we thing about schooling is wrong: J T Gatto
Part of your thesis is that the true
purpose of compulsory government schooling is conditioning, conformity, rows of
chairs, routine, bells. Jerry Mander, author of the Four Arguments for the
Elimination of Television, uses the phrase ‘form is content.’ The form of
public schooling is its content.
… habit training and attitude training is
imposed by the structure. Alexander Inglis, around the First WorldWar, wrote a
book, it’s very, very hard to get, called “Principles of Secondary Education”.
The first is to make people predictable so
that the economy can be rationalized. You can do that if people are
predictable. Yet, history has demonstrated over and over and over again that
we’re not. So the very first purpose or goal of institutional schoolings is to
make people predictable.
Darwin was a big influence, but it’s not
the Darwin that is sold in school text books. It’s not the fellow curious about
nature. It’s a fellow absolutely certain that animal trainers and plant
breeders had discovered the operational truth of human life. Darwin’s “Descent
of Man”… was immediately adopted by the managerial classes of the planet.
You had to find ways to lock up the evolutionarily retarded, to waste their
time and set them against one another.
John Calvin says clearly that the damned
are many times larger in number than the saved. The ratio is about twenty to
one. There are too many damned to overwhelm with force. So you have to cloud
their minds and set them into meaningless competitions with one another in ways
that will eat up that energy.
Spinoza …1670… had a huge influence on the leadership
classes of Europe, the United States and Asia… “Tractate Religico
Politicu”…it was nonsense to think people
were damned or evil because there was no supernatural world. He also said
there’s an enormous disproportion between permanently irrational people who are
absolutely dangerous and the people who have good sense. The ratio is about
twenty to one. Spinoza actually says that an institutional school system should
be set up as a ‘civil religion’… everyone read Spinoza, all over the planet.
He said
we need a ‘civil religion’… to eliminate official religion, which he says is
completely irrational and dangerous. And two, to bind up the energies of these
irrational twenty to one and to destroy their imagination.
Johann
Fichte in Northern Germany in 1807, 1808, 1809, where the very first successful
institutional schooling in the history of the planet, was established… in his
famous Addresses to the German Nation, that the reason Prussia suffered a
catastrophic defeat against Napoleon at Jena was because order was turned on
its head by ordinary solders taking decisions into their hands.
University
of Leipzig in the 1870's… the Father of Behavioral Psychology, Scientific
Psychology, Bill Helmvoight… every college presidency of any significance in
the United States, with the single exception of Cornell, is awarded a Prussian
PhD. Every department head had a Prussian PhD
The
subject is schooling and all the unexamined assumptions schooling imply, such
as - to be removed from your family, your neighborhood, your traditions, your
church, whatever other source you have and be placed in the hands of total
strangers who you come to see are, all from bottom to the top, flunkies.
They’re all interchangeable. None has any original ideas. This qualifies them
as guards, to see that the training is imposed as it was designed.
Television
and school – they do exactly the same thing in slightly different ways - even the wonderful stuff… – both
being abstractions retard the capacity for that critical examination.
“Wealth
of Nations.” You’ll see that in the first 15 pages he says that peasant
children are quite as capable of sitting at the policy table and making high
level decisions as the Duke’s children.
… the
mind’s capacity to create and invent. Television undermines this capacity. The
collapse of descriptive language undermines this. If you don’t use it you lose
it Real education is not knowledge based. Real education is the unfolding of
this capacity.
Back in
the sixties an anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, published a series of best
sellers, supposedly about his apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian shaman, Don
Juan in Northern Mexico. The shaman said the key to everything is to always see
death sitting on your left shoulder, this hawk or this raven watching you.
Against School: John Taylor Gatto
H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American
Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not ‘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 safe 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.’
Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher
Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the
Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's
"Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education
in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call
for its schooling to be brought here.
James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard
for twenty years: 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State…
that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution"
engineered 1905-30.
Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles
of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the
eyes of a revolutionary."
1) The adjustive or adaptive function.
Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
2) The integrating function. This
might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention
is to make children as alike as possible.
3) The diagnostic and directive
function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role.
4) The differentiating function.
Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be
sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social
machine merits - and not one step further.
5) The selective function. This
refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection
as applied to what he called "the favored races."
6) The propaedeutic function. The
societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of
caretakers.
Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton
University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association
in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we
want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every
society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to
perform specific difficult manual tasks."
In the 1934 edition of his once well-known
book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley
detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had
extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point
still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of
Education and Conant's friend at Harvard - had written the following in the
1922 edition of his book Public School
Administration: "Our schools are ...factories in which the raw
products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business
of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid
down."
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