the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states

The purpose of education has always been moral:



Maintaining Classroom Discipline by using Democratic Methods - YouTube



Let's Be Good American Citizens at School - 1953 Educational Documentary - Ella73TV - YouTube

However, recently, moral panic has swept the West:



Jay Doubleyou: panic in the west over educational achievements in the far east

But should these comparisons be made?

In fact, it was Europe and not China which developed modern technology:
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Needham Question
Great Divergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "Golden Mean" Doctrine in the Chinese cultural tradition is not conducive to the cultivation of innovative scientists.
Why can’t China win the Nobel Prize?
CHINESE SCIENCE AND THE ‘NOBEL PRIZE COMPLEX’

Because, it could be said, the education system in China and the East Asia tends to produce students of a certain type:



Be Glad for Our Failure to Catch Up with China in Education | Psychology Today

But hold on: things aren't that great in 'the West' either...

Despite more and more money going into schools, literacy rates have collapsed in the West:

According to John Taylor Gatto, once a New York Teacher of the Year, military applicants in the 1930s tested 98 percent literate.  During World War II our soldiers’ literacy rate was 96 percent.  In 1950 only 81 percent of Korean war enlistees passed literacy tests, and by the 1970s, during the Vietnam war, the percent was down to 73.

Maybe that drop can be explained by an army recruited increasingly from the unprivileged.  But Gatto points out that in 1940 the general white population tested four percent illiterate and blacks 20 percent.  Now the numbers are 17 and 44 percent.  Black illiteracy has doubled, white has quadrupled.

What's Wrong With the Schools? - The Donella Meadows Institute
Everything We Think About Schooling Is Wrong! 

Here is John Taylor Gatto:


Mini-Documentary - John Taylor Gatto - MUST SEE! - "Classrooms of the Heart" - YouTube
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever

And here is his explanation for why 'education standards' have been declining:

... you shouldn’t be fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams was fooled when he observed in 1880 that what was being cooked up for kids unlucky enough to be snared by the newly proposed institutional school net combined characteristics of the cotton mill and the railroad with those of a state prison.

Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a “human resource” and managed as a “workforce.” No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled.

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance.

Schooling an Industrial Proletariat : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

John Taylor Gatto has had a lot more to say about education:
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever

We might well praise the achievements of the German education system:
Jay Doubleyou: neets - again
'The best engineers come from Germany' - BBC News

However, this is what Gatto has to say about the foundations of that system:



The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube
Prussian education system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Full text of "John Taylor Gatto The Underground History Of American Education Book"

And here he makes it clear, in his opinion at least, what 'the purpose of education' is:



John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose Of Schooling - YouTube

With the full text here:
John Taylor Gatto – The Purpose of SchoolingTruth versus Disinformation . . . Everything You Know is Wrong About Schooling

Here's an overview:
Human Resources: Gatto explains the seedy origin of public education-indoctrination - YouTube

This is John Taylor Gatto's own life experience:
The Hall of Mirrors by John Taylor Gatto - Life Learning Magazine

But it's not just Gatto who has pronounced on these things:

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.’

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 - 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."

Against School, by John Taylor Gatto
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down

Ivan Illich, another 'radical' educator had this to say:



Scary School Nightmare - YouTube
Deschooling Society - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jay Doubleyou: deschooling society

Which leads us to some 'solutions'...

Don't go to school:

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever 'graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Contad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.

How could penniless elementary school dropout Edison grow up on his own in a working-class environment, invent the electric light, the phonograph, win 1,003 patents, and build General Electric? Edison had contempt for college graduates and discriminated against them in hiring all his life. 

WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION

Try home-schooling:
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works

“Now for the good news… School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

John Taylor Gatto: Why Public Education Cripples Our Kids | COMMON CORE

Look at how 'elite' private schools prepare children to face the world:



John Taylor Gatto 14 Principles of an Elite Boarding School Curriculum Build a better you - YouTube
Elite Boarding Schools' Curriculum - Mark D. Carlson
John Taylor Gatto’s 14 Themes of the Elite Private School Curriculum

See also:
Jay Doubleyou: socratic method
Jay Doubleyou: socratic method pt 2

And:
Jay Doubleyou: questioning and problem-solving

And:
Jay Doubleyou: teaching the teachers: the future of education

Lastly:
Human Resources - YouTube
Taylorism on ABC World Report - YouTube
The Scientific Management of Children - John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

But not quite:
David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’ | Books | The Guardian
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