- In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the
University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were
a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the
future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by
their associations"not by their own individual accomplishments. In
such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous
because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know
how to find out what they don,t know by themselves, without consulting
experts. -- Kurt Johmann, quoting John Taylor Gatto
-
- The question on the minds of many people with
consciences who are so aghast at the sudden savagry of the new
terror-based policies of the U.S. goverment is how has the American
public so silently and willingly acquiesced to the dishonest and
murderous attitudes of George W. Bush and his criminal oil
cartel.
-
- The hypnotic power of television is of course one
main component of the fearful powerlessness that now grips the
American populace and has the rest of the world cringing in fear about
where the power elite's military monster will strike next. That is a
subject for another time.
-
- The real credit for this continuing American coma
belongs to something that has been right in front of our eyes all the
time. It's something we have supported, spent our money on, and prayed
for, something we have participated in ourselves.
-
- The reason Bush has been able to get away with lie
after lie in his drive to obliterate our Constitution and install
himself as dictator of the world is our public school system. What
they did to all of us is directly related to what is happening now in
the world.
-
- This connection becomes perfectly obvious when you
read Kurt Johmann's essay, "Unschooling: Self-directed learning is
best," on his website ( http://www.johmann.net/ )
-
- Johmann, a software developer who lives in Florida,
quotes John Taylor Gatto, an award-winning teacher who taught in New
York City government schools for 26 years and quit teaching in 1991
"so he wouldn't harm any more children." Gatto, author of "Dumbing Us
Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling," and other books
investigating the fallacies of public education, insists American
public schools teach a hidden curriculum of seven lessons:
-
- 1. Confusion. Gatto notes several things
contributing to what he calls the lesson of confusion, including: a
lack of subject-related context for what is taught; too many unrelated
facts and unrelated subjects; a lack of meaning and critical thinking
about what is taught.
-
- About this lack of critical thinking Gatto says:
"Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school
or a teacher could be criticized, since everything must be
accepted."
-
- With this kind of training, how would it be possible
for a kid to know what valuable things are NOT in public school
curricula? And by extension, how would it be possible for that same
adult to discern that what her leaders tell her about American history
bears little resemblance to what happened to the victims of those who
wrote the histories?
-
- 2. Class position. Gatto points to the way students
are kept in the same class by age, and, within this age
classification, further classified and separated depending on how the
students have done schoolwise (for example, classification into
so-called gifted classes).
-
- About this lesson Gatto says: "That's the real
lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your
place."
-
- As someone who has suffered from this myself, you
have to ask how many learning opportunities are lost because children
are not properly identified using rigidly mechanistic criteria.
-
- 3. Indifference. For this lesson Gatto is referring
to the effects of the ringing bell that announces the end of the
current class and the need of the student to drop whatever she is
doing and proceed to the next class where a different teacher and
subject await her.
-
- About bells Gatto says: "Indeed, the lesson of bells
is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about
anything?"
-
- And as far as educational evolution goes in kids,
this rigidity causes children to assign equal value to all classes,
say math and gym, without regard to their relative importance.
-
- 4. Emotional dependency. This lesson results from
students having to submit to the designated authority, the teacher,
regarding their personal desires during class time. As Gatto says: "By
stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and
disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined
chain of command."
-
- By the time this learned tendency reaches adulthood,
it prevents many people from realizing there may be more qualified
candidates other than the two corporate-approved rivals for any given
office.
-
- 5. Intellectual dependency. This lesson is similar
to the lesson of emotional dependency, since both lessons teach
students submission to the designated authority. In the case of the
lesson of intellectual dependency, the students specifically learn
submission to establishment authorities, including the teacher, on
intellectual matters.
-
- This definitely discourages thinking "outside the
box" when alternatives are presented to any given problem.
-
- As Gatto says: "Successful children do the thinking
I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of
enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what
few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless
employers. Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the
concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions
for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it.
How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately
[Gatto is being ironic] there are tested procedures to break the will
of those who resist "
-
- 6. Provisional self-esteem. As Gatto says: "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."
-
- As a result, when people get older, they may not be
able to determine the worth of a given activity without someone whose
authority they covet approving their decision. Put more simply, they
may not be able to think for themselves.
-
- 7. One cannot hide. By this lesson Gatto means the
effect that constant surveillance has on students as they are watched
by teachers and other school employees. About the underlying reason
for this surveillance Gatto says: "children must be closely watched if
you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will
follow a private drummer if you can,t get them into a uniformed
marching band."
-
- How many passions have been lost to students who
were told their natural aptitudes were leading them in the "wrong"
direction, and whose talents were blunted by the corporate-approved
drive toward regimented conformity?
-
- Besides teaching this hidden curriculum, Gatto
asserts, the schools also separate children from their families,
thereby weakening the bonds of family. This attack against the family
is a part of the larger campaign in America to atomize people into
individuals, so that having only themselves, they are weak and
helpless and unable to resist the establishment, Johmann notes.
-
- Having read this laundry list of what public schools
do to our children, isn't it clear that our government is behaving in
the same way as our monolithic school system, and isn't it even
clearer that this process is not producing thoughtful human beings?
Instead, the vast majority are the flag-waving zombies who cheer as
American military might murders innocent children in faraway places,
and turns its own citizens into robotic, thoughtless advocates of "the
war on terror"?
-
- If you have kids in school, be sure and study
Johmann's website and its links before you make the decision to get
them out of public schools as fast as you possibly can.
-
-
- John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of
Florida whose education really didn't begin until he got out of
school.
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- By Alfred Lehmberg
Lehmberg@snowhill.com
12-27-2
-
- A pragmatic person and a retired soldier, I can, of
course, see the need for *some* direction and oversight in culture and
society. It is the product of *some* point to reality, rationality,
and realism that humanity (select portions of it, anyway) stands on
the landing of a 21st Century medical and technical wonderland, as
much as it does! But "Direction" and "Point", as practiced by elitist,
sociopathic, and corrupted leaderships, institutions and agencies are
just additional concepts to be abused and misused -- like "national
security", "social security", or "homeland security"!
-
- I'm a FAILED second-career public school teacher
whose REAL education began, also, towards the end of a formal one,
forgetting that it was the *formal* one which allowed me the
opportunity for access to that larger, more satisfying, and more
accurate *informal* one. And there's the rub.
-
- An American public education system in plainly more
interested in producing good, docile, and God fearing *employees* than
it is in producing creatively intelligent, rational, critically
thinking human beings, students and teachers. I was THERE, good
reader! I -know- this to be true! Indeed it is among the unjust
reasons I was summarily fired from a public school teaching
position.
-
- When John Dewey, the FATHER of American education,
condemned the rank and file American man and woman to creative slavery
in the service of this authoritarian elite of the corporate arbitrary,
he was acting upon the strident and unabashed sociopathy of his times.
This was a time when the mighty white was more than right and the
mongrel brown should best leave town! This was a time of an
appallingly applied eugenics and enforced sterilization (even
annihilation!). This was a time of an abject lack of meaningful
protection from corporate criminals selling substandard consumables
and enriching themselves on planet destroying planned obsolescence
continuing today!
-
- We begin to see the error of these shortsighted
ways?
-
- Another dean of American education, Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi, observed that the poor must be TRAINED to their poverty.
The poor (anyone outside a privileged elite) are very broadly defined.
Additionally, the reader can readily reason that if the poor can be so
trained to accept their lot in cruel life the RICH can be trained in a
similar, but opposing, manner. The general reader can bet that THOSE
kids are being trained to be the leaders in this twenty-first century
even as -their- children are -not-. No -- their kids are being trained
in a manner clearly described by John Taylor Gatto (a minor god in
-my- personal pantheon) to be the artless SHEEPLE so written about --
expendable motes as dry as the chalk dust in their pitiable
classrooms.
-
- I was not REMOTELY interested in producing
sheeple-aping employees, but in each individual achieving the creative
and self-actualizing personal goals of which they were able. Somehow,
I had convinced myself that this was the overriding goal of the
America I believed in, an America that was the envy of the world, I
thought -- an America that I had served so well on its flawed
battlefields. I would move that battlefield to America's classrooms.
It is no -wonder- I would be torpedoed...
-
- I am a very highly decorated retired military
officer and combat veteran with impeccable credentials and bulletproof
references that could -not- make it public education. Can the reader
entertain, along with me, the idea that the problem was not -all-
mine?
-
- We are better than our manipulators. We see the
value in our individuality. We resent our trained poverty, our dearth
of respect from society and culture, and the lack of aggregate
humanity from our corporate overlords... we -will- drag these
hijackers of the mainstream screaming from their ivory towers
eventually, perhaps sooner rather than later. Even a "sheeple" can
only be expected to take so much. The individual IS key, and the REAL
power behind anything else, after all.
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From jdh
- To: Lehmberg@snowhill.com
- Sent: Saturday, December 28, 2002
-
-
- This Saphardic Jew happens to think Jeff Rense is
doing a fantastic job of reporting the most important news. He is not
an anti-semite. At this time the world is in great danger from
egotistical insane leaders and we need to know what they are
doing.
-
- Thank you, Jeff!
- jdh
- Comment
-
- From Mary Linton
ekaiser@tds.net
12-30-2
-
- Bah, Humbug!!!! I am a successful teacher (TOTY,
STAR Teacher for three years, featured in PAGE Magazine, listed in
every edition of Who's Who Among America's Teachers) with 25 years
teaching experience over a period of 39 years in public schools and in
a private college. I have taught college chemistry, AP chemistry,
honors chemistry, CP chemistry, honors biology and CP biology, and my
students learn. You are making the same mistake as mainstream
education.
-
- If you assume ALL children are of high intelligence
with a consuming desire to learn, then Yes, they can be home schooled
or even self taught. However, ninety-five percent of students do not
fit the above criteria. They must be loved, pushed and prodded into
learning, at least by the time they reach high school age.
-
- Today's society is decidedly anti-learning. There
are a few very intelligent, knowledge-seeking young people and they
are our hope for tomorrow, but most students expect their parents'
standard of living to automatically be passed on to them while they
are entertained by today's media.
-
- Unschooling is ridiculous. Our students will
literally be unschooled and then where will we be? I assure you such
thinking if put into practice will turn civilization back 200 hundred
years, when the few educated people ruled the world. Yes, public
schools are assembly-line programs riddled with problems, but they are
too disorganized to accomplish the goals you stated. As long as there
are teachers in the classroom with high moral ideals and courage of
their convictions, then American Education is alive and well.
-
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