Compulsory Education And Permanent Childhood

[Lightfiend]

Compulsory Education And Permanent Childhood (http://www.theemotionmachine.com/government-and-politics/compulsory-education-and-permanent-childhood)


"John Taylor Gatto is an American retired school teacher of 30 years and author of several books on education. He has been the winner of the New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions and is an outspoken critic of the compulsory American education system.

Incredibly sharp-witted and a great storyteller, Gatto always has something thought-provoking to say. In this great speech he describes how our modern schooling system was formed to make us childish, docile, and dependent."

[Anti Federalist]

“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us… I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to *prevent* children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

“By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers – backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling: teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, et al. – has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.”

[squarepusher]

great, i've worked in schools and this was my take on it also

[fisharmor]

My wife and I are currently reading Weapons of Mass Instruction.
That is one f***ed up book.

I had to get through one or two pages at a time for the first 40 pages before I could read it and simply accept that I was going to be enlightened to some horrible truth.
My wife has more trouble with it than me because she was a "better" student than I was. For me, it's vindication for not playing along with their pavlovian grading system - for her, it's exposition of the fact that she was duped for 16 years.

John Taylor Gatto is IMO required reading for fellow revolutionaries. Once you realize that you're getting robbed and shackled, it's important to know how you got to the point of being willingly robbed and shackled: via institutional brainwashing.