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Be careful not to make a classical mistake of confusing the intentions of the parts (teachers, who I agree mostly mean well and want to help kids grow), with the intentions of the whole system (to dumb kids down so they fit into a 19th century militaristic industrial society, like NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto writes about).
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
    Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
    A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
"""

I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.

I think this gentleman and John Taylor Gatto have a lot in common. The "special" thing about Gatto is his ability to see a spade and call it a spade instead of getting lost in all of the justifications and excuses. This one-line summary in no way does justice to either of the above-linked works, but Gatto went to some of the poorest inner-city schools in some of the worst neighborhoods and found that the children there were eager and very able learners once you stopped treating them like idiots. You'd think the school systems would appreciate anyone who can demonstrate that, but they didn't.

So I think your analogy to the Chicago Bulls doesn't really work. The Bulls experienced a particularly outstanding individual but presumably, all the other players would have wanted to attain that level of talent. The school systems are experiencing problems that are institutional and profoundly anti-educational. I don't believe the problem with schools is funding or ability. I think the problem is that they are not really interested in improving their methods or looking too closely at their results.

So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:

Gatto:
    "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
    http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

Illich:
    http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
    http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html

John Holt:
    http://www.holtgws.com/

Collections of links by me on this:
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Why not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

See John Holt's books here (he was a long time school teacher):
http://www.holtgws.com/

NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."

The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."

With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the

See John Holt's books here (he was a long time school teacher):
http://www.holtgws.com/

NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."

The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."

With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the

Thanks for the reply.

How is there a natural scarcity of materials when the Earth is so big, and the solar system is even bigger?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

How is there a scarcity of energy when the Earth receives 10,000 times what the human race uses from sunlight (and there are also vast geothermal energy reserves)? Nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields and land are so ironic, because the same technologies would let us build habitats in space or build solar panels (or nuclear power systems). For half of one year's US defense budget, the USA could move to entirely renewable energy sources with energy efficiency, and be way more intrinsically secure than depending on long supply lines that need to be guarded by soldiers.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

So, I'd suggest that when people fight over land and raw materials, it is mainly either through ignorance, lack of imagination,
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
or through some sort of racket.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

I'll agree with you that power over other people is a motivator for some people, but maybe we have to stop worshiping such people and start labelling that as mental illness? Another vision of an abundant society where that does not happen is James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

Whether "people" are on top of the food chain is a matter of opinion. Bacteria and fungi eat humans in the end. And humans are roughly 90% bacterial cells by numbers and 10% by weight (mostly in the colon).

Maybe rather than create mind reprogramming technology, what we need to do is stop using the kind we invented already, which is present in compulsory schools, which were designed to create obedient soldiers and robot-like workers who would do whatever they were told, no matter how vile or boring:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"""
The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading dire

It didn't originate with Bismarck, per se, but it did start in Prussia, which is where Bismarck first governed. See http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm for instance.

"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will: ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""

For more on the history of schooling in the USA:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

For more on the history of schooling globally:
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance "
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists. ..."

The bottom line: schooling and education have very little to do with each other... Schooling was designed to dumb people down to produce mindless factory workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. Education helps a person grow into someone who can be part of or help create a healthy society while also creating joy and health for themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.

I agree with you on the vouchers part to some extent; the better solution may be to just give all the money directly to the parents, as I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out.
"""

Really good teachers would have nothing to fear from such a plan, because their would be enough money floating around so they could have flexible

On: "The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. "

There may be some truth to that, but the deeper problem is more like this, from John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"""
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."
"""

Schools *intentionally* dumb people down. Schools may stuff people with facts, but that does not make a whole intelligent person able to think and act -- it generally creates quite the opposite, someone unable to think for themselves. And that is actually the point, as a form of social control to implement a vision of a pyramidal society, as John Taylor Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. Fi

On: "The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. "

There may be some truth to that, but the deeper problem is more like this, from John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"""
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."
"""

Schools *intentionally* dumb people down. Schools may stuff people with facts, but that does not make a whole intelligent person able to think and act -- it generally creates quite the opposite, someone unable to think for themselves. And that is actually the point, as a form of social control to implement a vision of a pyramidal society, as John Taylor Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. Fi

That's insightful, to see schools from a different viewpoint, like any business. Schools exist primarily for other reasons than to educate. See John Taylor Gatto or John Holt. From Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."

And schools generally can't be fixed because none of the major players in the school system are rewarded for children becoming whole human beings capable of healthy participation in a healthy society:
"Power ÷ 22"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than prin

That's insightful, to see schools from a different viewpoint, like any business. Schools exist primarily for other reasons than to educate. See John Taylor Gatto or John Holt. From Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."

And schools generally can't be fixed because none of the major players in the school system are rewarded for children becoming whole human beings capable of healthy participation in a healthy society:
"Power ÷ 22"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than prin

See: "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487

The primary reason school was created was to dumb people down as a form of social control to create factory workers (and soldiers) for a 19th century factory-based economy, according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
"""

Or:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""

So, that's why pouring more money into schools does not work, because they just do this dumbing down process better. Oh, you may get kids stuffed with more facts, you may get kids with better grades, you may get kids who are better are regurgitating state doctrine, but you won't get good human beings who can have a happy whole life. A whole person comes from an engagement with the whole of life, not from doing paperwork all day in a minimum security day-prison from ages four to eighteen. The entire system must be changed from assumptions through practices, and school is so resistant to fundamental change that the best approach is probably just to shut it down entirely and start over in new ways using the same resources in entirely different ways.

For example, the central pillar of most schooling, grading, is harmful to children and communities in all sorts of ways:
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"""
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. ...
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. ...
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. ...
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective. ...
5. Grades distort the curriculum. ...
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. ...
7. Grades encourage cheating. ...
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships

I read about "Directed Teaching" (also called "Directed Instruction") in the book "Supercrunchers" by Ian Ayers and have done a little research since. Here is a good article: http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml . I went to Catholic schools (over 50 years ago) and the experience of directed teaching read as similar to how I was instructed by all those nuns. In the last year, every single time I've brought up the subject to a public school teacher I've been met with anger, fear, and VERY strong resistance. They hate my argument that, "If teachers were really concerned about being the best, they would adopt what works." (Forgive the rhetorical fallacy in that statement. Reason is usually not a prominent feature of these conversations by that point.)

I'm not a teacher, but over the last 40-some years I've never had a 4th-grader (or older) that I couldn't teach to do Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division and Square Roots in their head in less than two months. There is no excuse for people graduating from school without those skills. (I teach them the Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics. Teachers hate that because they don't know what the student is doing, but they know it works better than what they are teaching.)

Another interesting read is "The Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ . This book disturbs me for its lack of citations and the fact that it reads as if it were constructed on the same blueprint as a Dan Brown novel, but if you are concerned about the "school-as-prison" mentality, it is a good place to start. One of his other books, "Dumbing us Down" is very thought-provoking. He claims it takes about 200 hours to teach English Reading and Writing. If that's so, how can people spend 12 years in school and graduate without the ability to read and write?

As an interesting side note: The new head of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) is removing the barbed wire around his schools so they don't look so much like prisons. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6886238.html

I suggest the works of John Taylor Gatto.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

A former teacher who won awards as Teacher-of-the-Year for both New York City and New York State, Gatto has looked into the history of education in the United States and came to the conclusion that the Education system is working exactly as it was designed.

However, the U.S. education system was designed to prepare students to be cogs in the industrial machine, and that requires workers who have some basic skills but no independence or spirit of inquiry. In short, it requires workers who are half-educated - no more, no less - and so countless reforms never work because the system is already working exactly as intended.

These little piddling changes will make no difference. Allow the money to follow the students, that might make a difference. The government monopoly on schools will just continue on its old course.

As I point out in other replies, if you look at how hunter/gatherers lived, you will see that people can function quite well among relative affluence.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

It's true that material affluence by itself can produce problems, as this study shows the general poor mental health of many wealthy families in the USA:
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/

But, I think that leaves out that our society in the USA has gone too far towards an extreme, and that trend has been amplified by competitive compulsory schooling:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""

And that is reflected in the dominant mythology of the USA:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47

And US foreign policy around the world has actively tried to destroy anything that might have emerged as a possible alternative good example. For example, the first September 11, in 1973, in Chile:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-December/006458.html

So, people can live well together in abundance, and we have historical proof of that. Some people, one might even call this mental illness, can not. How to deal with that is an interesting question, but maybe, as a start, we should make sure the lunatics are not running the asylum? :-( And all it takes, in a democratic society, to do that, is to have good candidates and to vote for them, as well as to build positive alternative non-governmental organizations and better businesses.

So, respectfully, if you keep looking for better answers, you may sometimes find them.

As for robots, they

You're right, it is somewhat different, but that is how I see part of the link to this camera issue. I am conjecturing that the school staff did not think they were doing anything wrong based on their religious beliefs. Perhaps to their credit, if this was not something prurient, they thought they were upholding the better part of a perceived obligation to be a child's parent and do a difficult thing that needed to be done. This is only creepy and gross and insane if you don't agree with a schoolish religious world view. As Gatto says here:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

So, that is what is perhaps happening here. The school is just trying to do what schools do, only even better, using technology. They are adapting technology others hoped would be liberating and using it to further imprison children. In general, the internet has become a race between transitioning to a better society through abundance, understanding, and community versus being weighed down by chains of technology that allow a police state to easily profile all its citizen based on previous communications. Freedom -- use it or lose it.

Compulsory schooling has gotten worse in that respect over the last few decades, with pressures on it from all directions, whether political correctness, zero-tolerance, liability fears, and reflecting a general climate of fear that has been growing in this country (despite the real evidence showing, say, crime went down in most areas). But it seem quite likely that students learning to leave their rights at the door of the school (or worse, as alleged) has contributed to growing police state aspects in the USA. And, essentially, it is a main part of Gatto's thesis that, as a society, the USA has traded a high degree of liberty, self-reliance, and solid education for some form of dumbed-down apparent material security for many.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
(A material security which is rapidly eroding for many:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future )

I especially like Gatto's example here of the hypocrisy of it all (hypocrisy being all too common sometimes when religion is involved):
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"""
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
"""

You're right, it is somewhat different, but that is how I see part of the link to this camera issue. I am conjecturing that the school staff did not think they were doing anything wrong based on their religious beliefs. Perhaps to their credit, if this was not something prurient, they thought they were upholding the better part of a perceived obligation to be a child's parent and do a difficult thing that needed to be done. This is only creepy and gross and insane if you don't agree with a schoolish religious world view. As Gatto says here:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

So, that is what is perhaps happening here. The school is just trying to do what schools do, only even better, using technology. They are adapting technology others hoped would be liberating and using it to further imprison children. In general, the internet has become a race between transitioning to a better society through abundance, understanding, and community versus being weighed down by chains of technology that allow a police state to easily profile all its citizen based on previous communications. Freedom -- use it or lose it.

Compulsory schooling has gotten worse in that respect over the last few decades, with pressures on it from all directions, whether political correctness, zero-tolerance, liability fears, and reflecting a general climate of fear that has been growing in this country (despite the real evidence showing, say, crime went down in most areas). But it seem quite likely that students learning to leave their rights at the door of the school (or worse, as alleged) has contributed to growing police state aspects in the USA. And, essentially, it is a main part of Gatto's thesis that, as a society, the USA has traded a high degree of liberty, self-reliance, and solid education for some form of dumbed-down apparent material security for many.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
(A material security which is rapidly eroding for many:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future )

I especially like Gatto's example here of the hypocrisy of it all (hypocrisy being all too common sometimes when religion is involved):
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"""
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
"""

You're right, it is somewhat different, but that is how I see part of the link to this camera issue. I am conjecturing that the school staff did not think they were doing anything wrong based on their religious beliefs. Perhaps to their credit, if this was not something prurient, they thought they were upholding the better part of a perceived obligation to be a child's parent and do a difficult thing that needed to be done. This is only creepy and gross and insane if you don't agree with a schoolish religious world view. As Gatto says here:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

So, that is what is perhaps happening here. The school is just trying to do what schools do, only even better, using technology. They are adapting technology others hoped would be liberating and using it to further imprison children. In general, the internet has become a race between transitioning to a better society through abundance, understanding, and community versus being weighed down by chains of technology that allow a police state to easily profile all its citizen based on previous communications. Freedom -- use it or lose it.

Compulsory schooling has gotten worse in that respect over the last few decades, with pressures on it from all directions, whether political correctness, zero-tolerance, liability fears, and reflecting a general climate of fear that has been growing in this country (despite the real evidence showing, say, crime went down in most areas). But it seem quite likely that students learning to leave their rights at the door of the school (or worse, as alleged) has contributed to growing police state aspects in the USA. And, essentially, it is a main part of Gatto's thesis that, as a society, the USA has traded a high degree of liberty, self-reliance, and solid education for some form of dumbed-down apparent material security for many.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
(A material security which is rapidly eroding for many:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future )

I especially like Gatto's example here of the hypocrisy of it all (hypocrisy being all too common sometimes when religion is involved):
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"""
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
"""

If John Taylor Gatto is a paranoid lunatic, how was he New York State Teacher of the Year, and how did he teach in NYC public schools for about thirty years? And what does that say about schools? More by him on how the real curriculum of school has nothing to do with the informational content dispensed:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""

Neither he, nor I, would dispute that there are many, many amazing, caring, wonderful human beings who are teachers at all levels, who try their very hardest to help students grow. But the system is set up against that. See:
"Power ÷ 22"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Ed

Sending children to public schools is more irresponsible and abusive than opting out of vaccinations.

You gave lip service to home-schooling, which is nice, sort-of, but then came this indefensible rant:
Home school kids are massively underdeveloped socially, they miss out on a lot of cues that the rest of the population learned the hard way in social environment.

I'm calling you on the carpet -- this is your big chance. Prove it!

I never actually met someone who actually believes that our public school system, by and large, produces such well-adapted children. Nor have I met anyone who crows about the academic prowess of our elite Federal public schools.

I do hear *lots of* concern about drugs, rape, murder, school fights, dropouts, peer pressure, depression, suicide, ADD/ADHD, racism, bullying, teen pregnancy, AIDS/HIV, lack of discipline, school riots (!), hazing, poor grades, and on and on, in the public schools. Some of our good/safe local public schools have metal detectors, since students have brought guns into their lockers. How is this good "socialization," again?

Oh, by the way, my wife and I worked in the public school system for a few years (K-12 and junior college) and personally know many ex-elementary public school teachers who now home school! One of the reasons we all don't public school? Socialization!!! (Now, I do think colleges are generally safer than junior/senior high schools, but that's another story). Increasingly, our friends who teach in public schools are pulling their kids out, in favor of home schooling!

Do you have kids, BTW, or is this just a hypothetical rant -- "if I had kids?"

Uhm, maybe look up the definition of "socialization" or "socialize", some time. It's probably not a "good thing" at all, unless you like the thought police: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/socialization

If this is what you mean by "socialize," which of these these attributes would you call "good" with a straight face:
1. To place under government or group ownership or control. (Is this good -- really?!?!?! Public school *does do* this!)
2. To make fit for companionship with others; make sociable. (I'll grant you this one, maybe, if you like an institution defining it for you)
3. To convert or adapt to the needs of society. ("Bend to our will and do our bidding, slave!")

How about "socialization," itself?
1. a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position. (Should public school be telling our kids about their "norms" or "values" -- really?)
2. the act or process of making socialistic: the socialization of industry. (OK, we're defining the word with the word, here)

What is "socially normal" about a child spending his waking hours with a bunch of rowdy people/class clowns/bullies/jocks and picked-on kids/nerds/outcasts/druggies -- all part of a pecking order, all part of a high pressure/peer pressure "society," all kids roughly his/her own age for 13 years? How is this in any way like "society," outside of school? This "society" of public school is institutional, artificial, and orthogonal, compared to "normal" society.

As far as socialization of home schoolers is concerned (as I guess you are redefining the term "socialization"), prove it with actual evidence, please. I call foul. Please define your term, too.

You need to read John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/, some time, and remember that he's a public school expert and taught in NY public schools for about 30 years. He's also a researcher of public schools. He's a sharp critic of public (and even private) schools and he has ample evidence to destroy your tired old assumption, which is not based on fact.

Not only do public school students lack mental acumen, they also lack social sk

The problem with public education as a whole isn't the teachers (although there certainly are some who just don't care), it's the system.

You should read the book by John Taylor Gatto that I linked to earlier. He's a former public school teacher who did his best to actually teach kids until he couldn't stand dealing with the counterproductive bureaucracy anymore, researched and learned what was actually going on with public schools, and got the hell out.

I honestly can't complain about most of my teachers either, back when I was in school---I had several history/social studies teachers who were unorthodox and certainly didn't teach a mindlessly pro-American ideological curriculum. But what Gatto says about the school system---everything from the intentionally dreary and boring classrooms, to the prison-like strictly regimented schedules and class hierarchy, to the forced socialization and forced learning that make so many people hate the concept---rings true.

Ask yourself, what does it teach children to be strictly divided up into age-based and aptitude-based classes?
...to then either ridicule, or be ridiculed, as "jocks," "nerds," "preppies," "vocies," or similar?
...to be forced to learn something, or at least just sit there, whether they want to or not?
...to spend most of the day sitting silently, doing only what they're told, not even able to get up to use the bathroom without permission?
...to define "success" in terms of what their teacher expects of them?
...to constantly seek approval of authority figures in everything they do?
...to drop everything when the bell goes off or the school day ends, and go do something else?
...to either have to constantly deal with bullies, or turn into one in order to get by?
...to always run to teacher when they have a problem with another student?
...to constantly deal with surveillance, metal detectors, locker searches, random drug checks, and the occasional lockdowns and drug-dog raid?

What does spending thirteen years of one's life, three quarters of the year, 6-8 hours per day, living like this, teach people? (This is just some of the stuff I remember from Gatto's book, too.)

What portion of the claims do you feel are not attributable to the Act?

You're going to take issue with 'an increasing number of nerds'? Really? Why? Do you have anecdotal evidence to the contrary? It may be a spurious phrase, but it does almost nothing to detract from the statement as a whole.

Whether nerds or not you do not have to search very hard to find people who do not approve of 'dull slow lowest-common-denominator pop-psychology politically-correct schlock ladled out at public schools'. Check out the writings of John Taylor Gatto.

It really seems like you're just being pedantic. If that's the case, no reply is necessary. If not, I'm more than willing to discuss this topic. Public education is far from perfect...

If you think that there is anything inherently good about public schools you first need to read this essay, then read a book written by a public school teacher of 20 years.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.

The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of

There's a lot more to the history of compulsory education in Germany than that. There is a very detailed and well-researched book by John Taylor Gatto which you can read online about the history of public schooling. (Gatto is a former public school teacher.)

Thanks for the great reply. You make some great points. And it is true, most people in the USA have not been socialized to be self-regulating or self-directing. Example:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

So, yes, we need to rethink what education means and all sorts of other things. James P. Hogan's novels touch on some of these themes, especially Voyage From Yesteryear. People may need some time to adjust having all their assumptions about the world change.

On money and debt, see the second version of a related film, the YouTube part of the second version (Starting at 2:40) covers some of a rethinking of that:
    http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
But sure, there are imperatives in the financial system that drive this too, things like tying executive compensation to growth and not sustainability. Some of that can be fixed by mild inflation or demurrage, to keep money moving. But ultimately money is about rationing, and, as Iain Banks said, a sign of poverty.
   

"The education system isn't flawed"
Yes it is. At least from my POV. Some other slasher beat me to the punch - See http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ for a history of where we went wrong. The Prussian government designed the education system we use to prevent the proletariat from revolting (double entendre intended). If you take the POV of the American elite/aristocrats, then our education system is working perfectly well.
"As I learned in school, the first thing you do with a class is level their knowledge." - a young friend of mine with a BA in secondary education (name withheld to protect the young and ignorant)

An excerpt from "The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?

As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.

I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.

Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.

Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to wo

MOD PARENT UP!

Very insightful. I used to be very critical of Charlotte Iserbyt (author of "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"), because I thought her title and viewpoint were overly inflammatory, that, yes, there was too much incompetence and bad ideas in the educational system and our outcomes were falling behind those of other countries. But I've changed my mind lately. I'm convinced that it is deliberate. So my apologies for statements I made about Charlotte Iserbyt in the past.

The thing about the "conspiracy nuts" is that their ideas would never get so much traction if 100% of what they say is false. There is an absence of clear and credible answers, too many inconsistencies in the official stories, and not enough real information. So all kinds of crazy ideas spring out of that.

The problem with Sunstein's plan is that he wants to create infiltrators that parrot the official story, not just to shut down the crazy theories, but to get rid of the questions. And questioning government is vital to a democracy. When government has control of every side of the message, then, yes, all conspiracy theories go away, but so do any questions about what they are doing. And that's bad.

Anyone who honestly and thoroughly researches the topic and has enough guts to go wherever the facts may lead them will ultimately be forced to come to the same conclusion. The really funny thing is, the deliberate nature of it is almost obvious, provided one has the skill of totally disregarding anything that is said and instead examining the sum total of the actions that are taken. That's easier said than done and your first obstacle is the fact that you'd rather not believe it (this is one reason it takes some guts). Still, it's not well-hidden at all, it's hidden in plain sight. In the past, the designers of forced government schooling were much more open about their intentions.

For all of this, I know of no better reference than John Taylor Gatto. He has an essay here and a full book, available for free online in its entirety, located here.

It already has been proven. Three groups of kids. First group traditional education. Second is guided but loose (like a lot of decent homeschoolers - not all, mind you) and Third was kids who just had someone to ask questions of and list topics/projects. Guess which group scored better at the end of the testing? Yep... group three. With little more than the Google equivalent of a "teacher". You ever see how quickly school can suck the imagination, creativity and desire to learn out of a kid? And before you ask... "Values for a New Millenium"b Dr. Robert Humphrey. Info is in the last part of the book. Now, when he proved several techniques that took Inner City kids from drug addicts to straight A students... who do you think shut him down? Kids? No. Parents? No. School Board? You betcha. (And that isn't knocking all School Board people...) Read the book.

You'd love what John Taylor Gatto has to say on this subject. He also has a shorter essay here. He highlights how many of modern public schooling's techniques are profoundly anti-educational and seem designed to encourage dependency. He also advises that it takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and mathematics skills; after that, the person is capable of educating themselves given access to books and other resources. One trivial example of the damage this does can be found in those computer users who get confounded by very simple issues that are found in Page 1 of the manual, the README file, the help file, the FAQ, and the vendor's Web site, yet they still need handholding, not because they are incapable of reading and understanding the information, but because they feel helpless.

I am very grateful that there are people like this who will stand up and say something, who will expose these important ideas. Make no mistake, that takes courage. It's little wonder that you generally don't see folks like that on the prime-time evening news, for what they have to say, however true, is also quite inconvenient to many powerful interests.

Incidentally, you may appreciate my sig; it's quite apropos.

John Taylor Gatto says it best:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
    Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
    A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
"""

As John Taylor Gatto put it:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
      I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""

Three people who talk about education:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.holtgws.com/

From the first, Dr. David Goodstein:
"""
      We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
      It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus.
"""
   

The deep and barely hidden purpose of institutionalized schooling is to maintain a class based system. There are the "blue collar" workers(as Americans say) who do not have degrees and are thus locked into lower prestige and paying jobs. Then there are the "white collar" workers who have a degree, can get higher prestige and paying jobs. This is the true function of college and the university and not anything else: to create the modern class system. To get into the truly elevated class(since after all college grads are always as well a few paychecks away from being homeless bums) that in Marxian terms "controls capital with which to make more capital", going to college or not, cannot get you to such a vaulted level. Only hereditary inheritance can get you born into that status, or a chance combination of the right portions of luck, chance, proper connections, social climbing and ruthless greed in business matters. As Illich says in modern schooling the myth is maintained that "everyone has an equal chance to compete for equality," an absurd notion that modern propaganda has made into the common sentiment instead of a disturbing contradiction. This competition among the economic and social classes that are still in the similar situation of being a paycheck or two away from homelessness is what allows the disturbingly and grotesquely rich minority that can afford their own $100 million yachts and luxury Boeing 747's to remain undisturbed.

You are forced to learn in school new packets of information or knowledge all the time that serve no functional purpose within your life at that moment other than the demand the teacher imposes on you to retain the information at least long enough to be graded on. Those who just do it and get a good grade, only can do so by confirming to the institutional goals which can only exist outside their autonomy, desires and wants; such people are rewarded and promoted in school(pre-workforce). The higher prestige university you attend and higher grades you can get, the higher prestige job you can command upon graduation -- within its limits in the workforce. If a mouse is placed in a cardboard maze during an experiment and the mouse finds its way to a piece of cheese, can that mouse be compared with a wholly different type of mouse that realizing its situation chews through the cardboard when the experimenter is not on guard and escapes? As far as the hydraic institution of school is concerned, mice are meant to run around mazes to amuse experimenters through their mutual but useless competition. Thus in school whole generations are conditioned to conflate success with working against their self-desire and autonomy, a true battle against oneself to conform to the malicious modern social body and organization that only exists for profit motives or the motive of infinite institutional expansionism(since all corporations wish to grow as big as possible, all governments the same, and all organizations wish to be more successful and expansive). Modern success is the success of pleasing your teacher, who himself is a mere lose-able pawn deep in some labyrinth bureaucracy, who can only teach what curriculum stipulates he teach. Modern "success" is the success of pleasing your boss and company for a comparative trifle in monetary compensation compared to any large stockholder or President, Vice-President, CEO, etc. This is merely the "success" of working against your deep self-interests for self-defeating and paltry rewards possible only after humiliating yourself before the current social order as an obedient lackey of indifferent corporations -- the only social position left any longer for modern man.

Recommended reading:
Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society.
Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education.

Then imagine what would happen if everyone came to accept these few simple things.

Boy, that sounds great.

Now, do you have any good suggestions for solving the problems of the world we actually live in? Change human nature, perhaps? ;)

Sorry to be snide. Your world does sound great, but I think you'll have to fight an uphill battle if you fight against peoples' desire to be lazy.

There is precedent for what you call my world. The USA was not unlike this shortly after it was founded. While the book itself is about public education and how we obtained the system we know today, the best reference for this known to me is John Taylor Gatto's book which can be read online in its entirety for free.

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."

I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:

"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html

"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583

General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

Critical thinking and genuine problem solving, along with finding and assimilating information are the skills that matter today.

Absolutely correct.

Unfortunately those skills are too difficult to test on multiple choice standardized tests, so our system stays stuck in it's obsolete state.

A general population with true critical thinking and problem-solving skills is also quite difficult to rule. The first societal effect of such widespread knowledge would be a drastic reduction in the power and influence that government and corporations have over the people, as it would lead to the realizations that many of the excuses and justifications that were given for past power grabs just don't hold water.

The teachers will continue to prepare students for the government exams by teaching to the test.

Which they do because the government that runs the schools has decided that it's very important to them to do things this way, and have mandated that the teachers adhere to it. Even the teachers who understand why this method is flawed must either adhere to it or be fired. It doesn't take much critical thought to see that this is a "fox guarding the henhouse" type of situation.

Our schools have become a sorting mechanism (a poor one at that) and have lost nearly all traces of meaningful education.

The people who designed public schooling as we know it today and made it compulsory were surprisingly open about their intentions. They wanted "the rabble" (i.e. anyone not of an old-money family) to be smart enough to do useful work for the emerging industrial economy but not so smart that that they would be difficult to govern. Particularly, they were worried that people would continue the old American tradition of individual, self-sufficient enterprise because the industrial operations required enormous investments. They were also worried that people who knew how to question would question the political order and otherwise may not "know their station" as subordinates to the de facto aristocracy. The mandatory training in subordination that allowed a small percentage of the population to rule the other three castes in India and the statism of the Prussian system were viewed as enviable triumphs by the political interests that originally established public schooling.

The best authority on this subject is John Taylor Gatto. You might like his essay and he also wrote a book on the subject and made it available online.

Take a gander at John Taylor Gatto's book, An Underground History of American Education . Gatto is an award-winning former New York public school teacher, so he knows the system from the inside out. Simply put, public education was never designed to educate, it was designed to indoctrinate. It has as its basis the Prussian model of schooling. Basically, the idea is to mold young minds to serve the desires of their political controllers. It exists to make them subservient to state interests. At this it succeeds remarkably well. More time spent in schools is more time wasted by students, and more state-sponsored indoctrination of children.

All compulsory schooling is based on the finest "science" of the day.

All manner of behavioural "scientists" and psychologists have been at the forefront of modern education revolutions in the last two centuries or so.

The fact that over and over they are shown to be absolute quacks practicing nothing but pseudo-science doesn't stop the next generation from listening their generations version of the same, as this time they're right and the last generations were surely nothing but ignorant idealists who did damage to a generation of children. But not us!

And each generation they say "Now give us your children for just another 2, 3 or 4 weeks a year and *that* will fix the problem". And each generation the problem gets worse, illiteracy rises and the level of education drops but conveniently the founding ideals of the modern compulsory education system are closer and closer to being met.

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

-Woodrow Wilson

"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."

  - The first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board 1906

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2i.htm

Except John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schools is to dumb kids down. So give them more money and they will just do that even better. :-(
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
   

Correct, Science != Public Policy.... Science == Private Policy.

Step 1. Parents must get much more involved with their children and their education.
Step 2. Parents must stop relying on anybody else to educate their children and take control of their education. (See also step 1).
Step 3. Parents must emphasize all areas of education, including math and science, showing interest, themselves. (See step 1).
Step 4. Parents need to appropriately remove distractions to education, such as TV, Internet, Games, Disruptive Friendships, and teach a work ethic. (See step 1, once again).
Step 5. Parents may want to look at alternatives to where/how their kids get educated, such as private schooling, charter schooling, homeschooling, private tutoring, or supplemental education. (Again, see step 1).
Step 6. Parents should learn the subjects with their children (if they don't know the subject) and tutor them, if possible. (Really, see step 1).
Step 7. Parents should be sure their children have unconditional love by the parents. (Most important and saved for last).

If one family does this, their children excel. If millions do, a country excels.

The status quo of relying on the public school system to do all the education, discipline, and raising of children does not and never will work. We keep throwing more dollars at the problem and it keeps getting worse (at a rate faster than inflation).

Take a look at John Taylor Gatto's books, such as Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and The Underground History of American Education or here. While this is not a 100% solution, it should spur parents to do the steps, above.

The length of compulsory government education for children has steadily increased since it began as it was always the intention of the creators and maintainers of it to remove the task of raising children from parents to the child rearing "experts" (aka themselves). This in their own words was to ensure that children were moulded to requirements of industry and enlightened society without parents interfering and undoing all their hard work.

That is not in anyway a secret to anyone who has a cursory knowledge of the history of Compulsory Education.

Not to mention most of primary school now is purely social indoctrination and almost no hard academics is taught until fourth grade.

If you believe students are learning more than they did 50 years you're living in an *absolute* fantasy land.
  The fourth grade curriculum had children reading and understanding Shakespeare and de-constructing poetry. Being able to do advanced multiplication and division in their heads was compulsory (my mums books from primary school look just like my high school books, my eight year old boys third grade books look like my kindergarten books).
The school system educates children just fine by the way, you just have to understand what exactly it is that they are being taught.

Understanding starts here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Lots of jobs don't require much literacy, which is one reason schools are getting worse and worse at teaching basic literacy, even as they still stamp out initiative and creativity in many cases. :-( From John Taylor Gatto:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""

This robot is not very literate, but it will probably eventually take many jobs away:
    http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
"A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"

We need to rethink many things about our society and economy -- and compulsory schooling is interwoven with the notion of a command economy based on rationing and a scarcity-mindset. We need post-scarcity education to go with a post-scarcity economy. A related sci-fi story by Marshall Brain:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

It's ironic your tagline says "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging". Compulsory education was created precisely to have an underclass to in your words "grind into the machinery of the economy"; see John Taylor Gatto:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
So, unschooling is really about stopping the digging. But it sounds unbelievable at first because of "cognitive dissonance":
    "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
    http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. "
"Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh."
"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior.""
"Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars, schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our universal reading proficiency."
And so on...

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"""
Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes. ...
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil. ...
Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajo

As John Taylor Gatto suggests, if you can only keep your kids out of school for a few years, the early years are most important to avoid.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
"""
What to do?
    Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
    Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
    Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single formula for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications. ...
"""

So, by the time a kid is ten or so, they may be tough enough to survive in a prison-like environment as most schools without as much damage. Some might even thrive on it as long is they choose it themselves and know they can leave. Different kids have different needs and interests.
""Why Don't Students Like School?" Well, Duhhhh... "
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh

Unfortunately, for many kids, it is the opposite way usually, with school before homeschooling. The parents try school for a few years, when the most damage is done, and then homeschool the rest of the time after not liking the results of schooling. They may spend years trying to undo schooling and try to get kids to love learning again, and helping children unlearn a lot of consumerism, excessive stereotyped war-play, and a bad self-image that often comes from all that (of having your main role models be an authoritarian teacher and media-absorbed age-mates). A review of a related book I recommend to everyone that goes into some of these issues:
    "The War Play Dilemma"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html

Just to be clear, I think many school teachers are wonderful people trying their hardest to make a broken system work as best as they can. It's the "abstraction that has escaped its handlers" (Gatto's phrase) that is evil, not most of the people who are trapped inside that system.

As John Taylor Gatto suggests, if you can only keep your kids out of school for a few years, the early years are most important to avoid.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
"""
What to do?
    Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
    Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
    Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single formula for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications. ...
"""

So, by the time a kid is ten or so, they may be tough enough to survive in a prison-like environment as most schools without as much damage. Some might even thrive on it as long is they choose it themselves and know they can leave. Different kids have different needs and interests.
""Why Don't Students Like School?" Well, Duhhhh... "
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh

Unfortunately, for many kids, it is the opposite way usually, with school before homeschooling. The parents try school for a few years, when the most damage is done, and then homeschool the rest of the time after not liking the results of schooling. They may spend years trying to undo schooling and try to get kids to love learning again, and helping children unlearn a lot of consumerism, excessive stereotyped war-play, and a bad self-image that often comes from all that (of having your main role models be an authoritarian teacher and media-absorbed age-mates). A review of a related book I recommend to everyone that goes into some of these issues:
    "The War Play Dilemma"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html

Just to be clear, I think many school teachers are wonderful people trying their hardest to make a broken system work as best as they can. It's the "abstraction that has escaped its handlers" (Gatto's phrase) that is evil, not most of the people who are trapped inside that system.