Slashdot Mirror

I should also add:

http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm
"To speak of the "end" of work is to speak in the passive voice as if work is ending itself, and needs only a nudge from progressive policies to wind down without a fuss. But work is not a natural process like combustion or entropy which runs its course of itself. Work is a social practice reproduced by repeated, multitudinous personal choices. Not free choices usually -- "your money or your life" is, after all, a choice -- but nonetheless acts of human intention. It is (the interaction of many) acts of will which perpetuate work, and it is (the interaction of many) acts of will which will abolish it by a collective adventure speaking in the active voice. Work will end, if it does, because workers end it by choosing to do something else -- by living in a different way."

also: "The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and
Negri" by George Caffentzis
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article1927.html

And the schooling system perpetuates the problem:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7c.htm
"The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus. ... At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command. The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations--to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people's schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history."

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/
"A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong."

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"Now, when I asked my audience why educated Americans supported the war, they couldn't figure it out. One thing I heard is that since working-class young men had to go to war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But research shows that when people expect to go to war-whatever educational level they are-they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I pointed out that there are two social processes, both tied to school, that could help explain why educated people supported the war. One, educated Americans tend to be more successful and affluent, and thus have more allegiance to society. They have a strong incent

That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/

And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html

The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp

Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.

But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder

The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.

Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average, :-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.

See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm

John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/

Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm

_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri

I want to believe I have a place in society, but if it's a society of cookie-cutter people, then I may not.

I suggest you check out John Taylor Gatto's material if you haven't already. It will help explain the origin and implementation of the "cookie-cutter" society, although I don't think he uses that term.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/
Also audio downloads of some of his speeches :http://www.altruists.org/downloads/search/?restype=0&rescategory=0&resauthors=John+Taylor+Gatto&restitle=Enter+Keyword

I doubt that school is for you. I doubt school as implemented in our society is for students at all, although that is more obvious with some people than others. (For those of you who liked school, that's not my point, for those of you who are teachers, you don't control the implementation and I'm not insulting your character)

Hope you get something out of it. Maybe even inspiration for your search to find a place in society.

Fact is, most people in the US just aren't educated enough to recognize a scam.

Notice how I'm not saying stupid people. Just not educated for whatever reason. Most of the people that read slashdot are VERY tech knowledgeable. We grew up with this. Most of the people who get conned, didn't.

Whether they were too poor to afford a home computer and internet access, or were ahead of the technical wave... it doesn't matter. Remember, the internet hasn't been around that long in comparison to everything else. In the past 30 years, we've advanced more than we have in 300 years. Some people simply cannot keep up or get confused and don't try.

So it's suddenly surprising to you that with all this technology and most of the people not growing up with the technology, we have a lot of VERY uneducated people that are easily scammed?

>Until after WW2, hardly anyone graduated from high school.
That doesn't mean they weren't educated.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ is a good place to start.

I think you'll be surprised.

They build a mechanism that fitted the world as they knew it, not the modern world.

Some things are timeless, such as the observation that, given enough time, all governments decay into police states or dictatorships unless proactive steps are taken, primarily by those who can see the obvious, to prevent this. This is simply entropy on a large scale. The USA has already exceeded the life expectancy of a constitutional republic by nearly fifty years.

Modern things you might need from the government you will find research (that today cost so much that only the government can allow itself basic research), and some way to support the economy (like subsidies for education. This method works well in northern europe).

The government really has no legitimate reason to be in the education business, and if you actually research how "public" (government) schools got started you will find that the intentions of those who founded them in the USA and elsewhere were not nearly so noble as the common belief that it was done to benefit the public. The founders of it were surprisingly open about the fact that it was for the purpose of social control, not education. For example, Andrew Bell was fascinated by the schools in India, which had the sole purpose of instilling a docile, unquestioning servitude in the vast majority of the population (all except those from the Brahma, warrior, and industrial/trade caste) in order to maintain the caste system that could otherwise be overthrown by a revolution, since the menial and the "untouchable" castes were 95% of the population! A Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, was instrumental in bringing a system like this first to London and then to the USA; and while he had better intentions, he mistakenly believed that such a system could be used to achieve a different effect. ** Prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a speech during which he said:

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.

Around 1917, a group known as the "Education Trust" took control of the administration of the schools in the USA. This group consisted of people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. ** According to Benjamin Kidd, the chief goal of this group was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination." When you consider who these people are, you can see why they would want that, but it would be absurd to claim that this is for the public good, or that it's acceptable for government to use state police power to mandate compulsory education in order to meet this goal.

** Both of those quotes are almost directly from the book The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, and the full text can be read here. This is a complete book so you won't be reading the whole thing in ten minutes, but I would strongly encourage everyone to read it, since it's one of the best I have read on the subject.

This is nonsense, you are replacing the reason and the outcome. Any totalitaric regime is too involved in the everyday lives of its citizens, but it usually what it does after seizing power.

That's just it. The USA government is already too large and is already too powerful and is already too involved in the lives of its citizens. The people behind this are very smart and realize that seizing power all at once would probably create a backlash, so they are currently still busy establishing a national enemy -- Germany blamed its problems on the Jews, and we blame our problems on drugs, guns, and now terrorists (nevermind that you are more likely to be injured by a lightning strike than by a ter

Go read the historical reasons why school really sucks

That book explains everything you need to know about the education system, why it is so fucked and yes, why it is boring, what it really is supposed to do and how it is doing Just That Real Well.

Almost all these replies miss the deeper point. School itself models bullying -- an authority figure up front all the time who can do almost anything they please they please with your time and attention -- including inflicting the torture of years of boredom.

From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"""
Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.

Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.

Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.

I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.

In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:

1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.

You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?

One thing you do know is how unlik

I recently borrowed the book from the library, after reading a chapter in the middle about how the Supreme Court declared in the post-war period that Corporations are people too. This singular peculiarity of the law has enabled the present-day concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of Americans.

Whatever flaws Beatty's book has, it also has some good points. It meshes nicely with Gatto's Underground History of American Education. Gatto maintains that the government schools started to take off in the late 19th/early 20th centuries for the purpose of providing a dumbed-down workforce for the industrialists' factories.

Gosh, let's look at that quick list:

Research & development are pretty clearly not a federal issue; they're really not an issue for any State. Yes, the Internet was a result of federal research; but one wonders if it mightn't have existed anyway: networks are useful, and if something is useful someone will figure out how to make it.

Well, securing the borders is a federal responsibility. It seems to me that the President can't have a programme, though: all he can do is approve or deny the laws Congress passes (and they can of course over-rule him). As for how smart it is to increase H1-Bs, I'm uncertain. I've worked with some very intelligent visa workers for certain. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of very intelligent citizens let go. We keep on reading about a tech jobs shortage; why then is everyone in IT so desperately afraid of losing his job? I wonder if the agitation for more H1-Bs is not simply a way to keep wages down.

Please explain how this is a federal responsibility; please indicate which clause of the Constitution gives the President or the Congress that authority. I'll admit that interstate networks are naturally federal--but we already have some nifty interstate networks. The issue is not those, but the 'last mile,' which is quite clearly not federal in scope. It is local, though: just as roads, water, telephones and electricity are either public or very closely supervised by the states, so too should networks be.

That's not a federal responsibility. The Department of Education is unconstitutional, and should be eliminated. As for education, we know how to educate: it's easy. What we're not willing to do is actually do it. Read the Underground History of American Education for more about how American schools don't accidentally fail: they're designed to produce poor results and bad citizens. If you really want education to be a federal responsibility, change the Constitution; the amendment process is there for a reason.

My mom once told a story about the one time that my cousin was helping her with some baking. She was like, "Q, read off the recipe to me", and he said, "blah blah blah, Pecans, blah blah". My mom was like, "pecans? This recipe doesn't call for Pecans. ???"

So she went and looked at the recipe herself, and it called for walnuts. She was like, "Q, this says 'Walnuts', not 'Pecans'." Cousin Q responded that they were both nuts, and didn't get why it was important.

My mom talked to her mother in law, who got Q on a phonics program.

Gatto says that the switcheroo took place during WWII, and parents who were getting on with their lives post-war didn't notice that their kids weren't learning to read with the Whole Language Learning scam.

After reading the Dem Senator's comments and some of the discussion, my question is, "Why?"

First off, the engineering JOBS are going to China, India, etc. because the engineers there do a competitive job at a lower price. This won't change just because we graduate more Engineers (although it will drive the price for domestic Engineers down due to increase in supply). While there will always be a requirement for some local manufacturing and research, most of it will re-locate where it can be done most efficiently. In the near future this probably means China, India, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The government strongly subsidizes the teaching profession, and look what happened; we got lots of under-qualified teachers who are little more than prison wardens. (Parents should sue the Public School System for fraud.) http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

In Soviet Russia the government tells you what to learn.

Here's a link to the book's TOC: http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

John Taylor Gatto explains in his book (online) why putting more money into the system will not change things:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m

One of the most important things Gatto does is to distinguish between
"Education" and "Schooling".

The hardest thing to understand about schooling, Gatto suggests, is that
schools are not *failing* at their original purpose but are actually
*succeeding* at creating dumbed down and easily "class"-ified people.
So, for example, when people note that more money spent on schools does not
produce smarter kids, the issue isn't that schools are not working, but
instead it is that schools are actually working all the better for the more
money. It just isn't the point of schools to produce "educated" people (even
if that is what school administrators or school teachers might claim is the
point of schooling, and perhaps even genuinely believe themselves).
The big issue is just that the original purpose of schools, intended to
produce an industrial utopia by turning children into the adult robots 19th
century industry needed, is no longer very relevant to the information age
or a world where universal abundance is possible (say, via *real* robots
automating away those assembly line jobs) or even moving beyond the notion
of "work" altogether.
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html

Gatto maintains that public (and most private) school as we know it
is a state-oriented social institution originating in Prussia
designed specifically to produce mainly uncritical
consumers, compliant workers, and obedient soldiers, and that it is out of
step with the needs of an information age society which thrives on diversity
and creativity (as well as out-of-step with the needs of the individual).

See, for example:
"A Conspiracy Against Ourselves"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a
conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty
conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us
play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure
social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of
us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which
holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The
difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that
students go mad trying to escape it."

This idea that schools need a complete overhaul is now becoming somewhat
mainstream, see for example the title of this article:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
but unfortunately the solutions proposed (like longer universal
kindergarten) are still coming from those with industrial power (the
"captains" of industry again, but now the IT industry :-) and wanting cheap
laborers (but now, cheap and compliant intellectual laborers).

Another take on this issue from a different perspective:
"Sustainable Education" By Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195
"Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long
overdue. It is moving in the

John Taylor Gatto explains in his book (online) why putting more money into the system will not change things:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m

One of the most important things Gatto does is to distinguish between
"Education" and "Schooling".

The hardest thing to understand about schooling, Gatto suggests, is that
schools are not *failing* at their original purpose but are actually
*succeeding* at creating dumbed down and easily "class"-ified people.
So, for example, when people note that more money spent on schools does not
produce smarter kids, the issue isn't that schools are not working, but
instead it is that schools are actually working all the better for the more
money. It just isn't the point of schools to produce "educated" people (even
if that is what school administrators or school teachers might claim is the
point of schooling, and perhaps even genuinely believe themselves).
The big issue is just that the original purpose of schools, intended to
produce an industrial utopia by turning children into the adult robots 19th
century industry needed, is no longer very relevant to the information age
or a world where universal abundance is possible (say, via *real* robots
automating away those assembly line jobs) or even moving beyond the notion
of "work" altogether.
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html

Gatto maintains that public (and most private) school as we know it
is a state-oriented social institution originating in Prussia
designed specifically to produce mainly uncritical
consumers, compliant workers, and obedient soldiers, and that it is out of
step with the needs of an information age society which thrives on diversity
and creativity (as well as out-of-step with the needs of the individual).

See, for example:
"A Conspiracy Against Ourselves"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a
conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty
conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us
play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure
social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of
us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which
holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The
difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that
students go mad trying to escape it."

This idea that schools need a complete overhaul is now becoming somewhat
mainstream, see for example the title of this article:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
but unfortunately the solutions proposed (like longer universal
kindergarten) are still coming from those with industrial power (the
"captains" of industry again, but now the IT industry :-) and wanting cheap
laborers (but now, cheap and compliant intellectual laborers).

Another take on this issue from a different perspective:
"Sustainable Education" By Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195
"Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long
overdue. It is moving in the

The "Gifted Label":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18l.htm
"And American schools tend, fundamentally, to mistrust students. One way to deal with danger from the middle and bottom of the evolutionary order is to buy off the people's natural leaders. Instead of killing Zapata, smart money deals Zapata in for his share. We've seen this principle as it downloaded into "gifted and talented" classrooms from the lofty abstractions of Pareto and Mosca. Now it's time to regard those de-fanged "gifted" children grown up, waiting at the trough like the others. What do they in their turn have to teach anyone?"

The entire academic pyramid scheme leading to the PhD:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ... Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. ... However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. ... [The] issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think tho

> A lot of it probably has its roots with Christianity.

John taylor Gatto says quite the opposite: the industrial society, son of illuminism and industrial revolution, transformed culture in schooling. He probably is not attacking ideologically the industrial revolution, anyway, so neither am I.

I see a problem when you capitalize Christianity. We might go to the source as well:

Matthew 10:16
I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

Being shrewd implies intelligence. Sharp intelligence, according to the dictionary, even. And how does Jesus address people he doesn't like? "Bad"? hmmm, very often he says, "hypocrite", underlining the lack of applying principles to behavior, which is a matter not only of good heart but also intelligence.

(note: of course now you may be trying to recall where indeed reason is attacked. But those passages IMO don't criticize reason per se, but its use outside its scope, applying reason to the domain of a transcendent god. Stupid example: a transcendent god and the concept of "being one" are incompatible. Strictly speaking a possible aspect of a god that is transcendent can't be considered "one" "two" "many" because there is no whatsoever guarantee that the concept has any meaning outside our dimension.

So I have troubles making the consideration about Christianity applicable to schooling.

You might mean religious men were lethal obstacles for some knowledge to circulate, but it was a matter of defending a status quo which seems more political than religious to me. But I agree anyway since it happened.

But wait, it does not necessarily involve meddling with the student mental development. Intelligence doesn't matter, what is taught matters. See communist regimes which both kept students under control and made them better students than western ones at the same time.

Finally, I have way bigger troubles considering puritanism a radical christian movement. They are not if they are influenced by terror- the True Christian(tm) afraid of the death of the body? Hmmmm. We catholics are not radical either, as the Vatican permits killing in self defense. I'd say Francis of Assisi was radical.

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

Rockefeller's General Education Board - in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):

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.

In 1975 Gerald Bracey, a leading professional promoter of government schooling, wrote in his annual report to clients: "We must continue to produce an uneducated social class."

I could go on, but it makes me sick. Read the book

Why is it that so many school districts are so quick to buy expensive Micro$soft software when free (and sometimes better) alternatives exist, then turn around and complain about not having enough money?

Go to http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/ and read the (free online) book, Underground History of American Education and you will see why our schools and the administrators are so incompetent.

I picked up a copy of the first Harry Potter sometime before the first movie was released - I had the idea that I was going to read the book first. Somehow I managed to scan my eyes over all the pages of text. Something about a boy and his broom. The movie had been released on DVD by that point, and I eventually rented it.

I also picked up a copy of the second book before the movie was released. I was only able to get 50 or so pages into it before I was lost. Didn't bother to rent the movie.

Tried to read Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring before the movie came out. I was lost in the first chapter.

I do alright with non-fiction books that I've an interest in, and was reading John Taylor Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher the summer after I finished teh college, and all my reading troubles suddenly made sense. Mr. Gatto realized over the course of his 30-year teaching career that most of his 7th-graders were incapable of reading beyond the level required for a standardized test. To prove this for his readers, he suggested going to the library and borrowing a copy of the classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, read the first 20 pages, and return for a question on the text.

I went to the library, checked out the book, and scanned the first 20 pages as best I could. I saw the answer to Mr. Gatto's question, but only because I'd read the question before going to the library. But he did have a follow up question too, and I had no idea whatsoever what was going on in this particular book.

Gatto says that he found that most his students didn't 'make pictures' to go along with the words comprising book's stories. Not because they can't, but because the way reading is taught in the Feral Government's schools trains children not to make pictures, but to read for the (multiple-choice) test.

Finally - why I couldn't (and still can't) read fiction. I've been spending these last few years trying to get my mental-picture-maker working, and when I succeed someday, then I'll pick up the Harry Potter books again. Until then, I'm not going to frustrate myself with fiction anymore.

Actually, go to http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/ and you will see (very well referenced) that the American education system is designed to fail on purpose. John Gatto's book, Underground History of American Education is free at the site.

Public school in the United States is poorly designed to accomplish any goal other than "keep kids off the street and pay a bunch of bureaucrats salaries".

You are quite wrong. The US population used to be approx 90% people having independent livelyhood, now most people work for a corporation. The public school system is designed to extend the age of childhool well beyond natural limits and produce a dependent population that will take orders in a job without demanding too much in the way of compensation.

The public school system achieves this goal in exceptional fashion, and is very successful.

Sites to check out: http://johntaylorgatto.com/
http://www.altruists.org/downloads/by_subject/othe rs/education/

You think maybe the rest of the students might be there to learn something?

Most of them are there because they have to be.

My daily refrain for about ... 5 years was, "do I have to go to school today?" I hated school, and I was good at it. My teachers tried, but it was almost as if the system was designed to keep all of us from ever gaining any traction.

Only after I graduated from teh college did I realize how right I was. Picked up a copy of Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher, and realized that I'd never really learned how to read. I did just fine with the multiple-choice tests, but comprehension was another matter entirely. I do alright with certain non-fiction books, but I can't read fiction worth a damn.

John Holt recognized the scam 50 years ago - How Children Fail was published in 1962, iirc. Holt's How Children Learn gives some good strategies for working within the system...

Seems many of them built factories only to find them understaffed after a few months. The available labor (at that price) was quickly swallowed up by the first few factories, and those that built later found themselves stuck with colossal factories and a snooty labor force that demanded higher wages before they'd consider it. Natural market forces are a bitch when you're a wealthy scion expecting a guaranteed profit.

I've never seen this story (about labor "drying up" quickly) even in the most left-slanted historical accounts. I strongly suspect you're just making it up. Again, considering that completely unskilled children could do most of the work, it's extremely unlikely that (highly risky) political lobbying is the path of least resistance.

The old Prussian schooling system is the basis for the modern US system. It got springboarded into implementation by the early barons: Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, and Morgan. Check out John Taylor Gatto's book on the underground history of American schooling. All the chapters are available free at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

See:
    "The Underground History of American Education" -- John Taylor Gatto
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
"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.""

Intel isn't alone. There is too much inventory nearly everywhere, as Fred Hickey recently noted in his High Tech Strategist subscription newsletter: "We have excess PC inventories, excess cell phone inventories, excess auto inventories, excess networking inventories (the Cisco 'Lean' initiative), excess telecom inventories (carrier consolidation), excess PS3 and Xbox game consoles (disappointing sales), excess iPod inventories, excess computer server parts, excess disk drive inventories, excess DRAM inventories, excess microprocessor inventories -- and it will all be cleared during the housing and credit bust, and the first consumer cutbacks in 16 years."

Back in 1840, literacy rates were 90% and above in the US. And that was complex literacy. What would have been a 5th grade text in 1840 is now college material.

Learning to read is not difficult for somebody who's self-motivated. And nearly everybody wants to, until someone (usually a teacher or some "expert specialist") comes along, administers a test, and says, "you're dyslexic, a slow learner, stupid, or x,y,z diagnosis." That's plenty to take the wind out of your sails for a while.

Why do educators make a big fu$$ about reading? They're always arguing about phonics vs. whole-word, switching between versions of the two every couple years, depending on what's trendy in the education schools. But really, learning the alphabet and the sounds they make takes less than 30 hours. After that, there's nothing left to be taught. It's up to the student to make a private appointment with themself and practice using the alphabet key to unlock written language.

I have found that John Taylor Gatto's books on the underground history of modern schooling are a good place to start in understanding how all of this has come about. His last book is available for free in HTML on his website: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

Thanks. I felt some rare inspiration.

It came from that book I referred to in the previous post.

Some also came from reading about 1/3 of the online book here johntaylorgatto.com/.

I've been rethinking my thinking.... :-)

Consider what Gatto writes here:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"The first lesson I teach is confusion."
"The second lesson I teach is your class position."
"The third lesson I teach kids is indifference."
"The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency."
"The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency."
"The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem."
"The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide."
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life."

It may be a long journey before you are willing to admit you have been bamboozled by the very people who proclaimed to be your salvation. It was for me. :-)

As I said in the title, the Gifted label is used to control. If you are a standard product of school, even of a "gifted program", you have been controlled -- neutralized -- domesticated. You have been shaped to fit into a 19th century Brave New World industrial model of how society should be. OK, so you were tracked as an Alpha, so what? You were still controlled -- and limited -- against your wishes. Those very wishes were shaped to fit the perceived needs of that industrial order.

It does not matter if many or most teachers are caring individuals -- they remain the agents and prison wardens of this system; their range of behavior is limited by the system they are embedded in. That is one reason so many of the most caring ones burn out early.

I have no doubt that people vary in interests, experiences, or potential. Consider Howard Gardener's work Frames of Mind. The theory of multiple intelligences: __
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm
"In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings - initially a blank slate - could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories or that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)"

There may well be people who excel at everything. You may be one of them. But so what? How does that justify "compulsory schooling" of anyone? Except to control them. To neutralize any potential benefit of that intelligence on social structure. Even if kids need to be in day prisons because their parents are forced to work to survive (even in this age of abundance):
http://www.whywork.org/
why not "Free schools"?
http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml

On conspiracy, if you read the rest of that online book, you will see that Gatto does not believe in "conspiracy" in a large sense. As he says here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

'Gifted Child Industry' Preys on Parents' Insecurities
http://www.alternet.org/story/42644/?comments=view &cID=259124&pID=259049

The "Gifted and Talented" Fraud
http://borntoexplore.org/unschool/gifted.htm
"The truth is that "gifted and talented" programs are fast-track indoctrination courses, not real academics."

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/15c.htm
"I could regale you with mountains of statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I could bring before your attention a line of case studies to illustrate the mutilation of specific individuals--even those who have been apparently privileged as its "gifted and talented." What would that prove? You've heard those stories, read these figures before until you went numb from the assault on common sense. School can't be that bad, you say. You survived, didn't you? Or did you? Review what you learned there. Has it made a crucial difference for good in your life? Don't answer. I know it hasn't. You surrendered twelve years of your life because you had no choice. You paid your dues, I paid mine. But who collected those dues?"

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologu e_print.html
"In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling."

"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. Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly: Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."

'Gifted Child Industry' Preys on Parents' Insecurities
http://www.alternet.org/story/42644/?comments=view &cID=259124&pID=259049

The "Gifted and Talented" Fraud
http://borntoexplore.org/unschool/gifted.htm
"The truth is that "gifted and talented" programs are fast-track indoctrination courses, not real academics."

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/15c.htm
"I could regale you with mountains of statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I could bring before your attention a line of case studies to illustrate the mutilation of specific individuals--even those who have been apparently privileged as its "gifted and talented." What would that prove? You've heard those stories, read these figures before until you went numb from the assault on common sense. School can't be that bad, you say. You survived, didn't you? Or did you? Review what you learned there. Has it made a crucial difference for good in your life? Don't answer. I know it hasn't. You surrendered twelve years of your life because you had no choice. You paid your dues, I paid mine. But who collected those dues?"

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologu e_print.html
"In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling."

"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. Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly: Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."

You bring up some good points, but how about taking it even further. Why do we even need the state-run education system?

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

I'm not specifically endorsing this book, but it is very thought provoking (especially because, if you're a product of the forced-schooling system, there's a 30% chance you can't read this book).

That's not a sudden deviation from normal stupidity. It's also not normal stupidity. It's Massachusetts Malevolence. They've always been the first to experiment with new, pernicious educational ideas that later get forced on the entire country.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

I'm home-schooled, and I damn well will home-school my own kids.

"No. Sorry, but no. This is nothing more or less than a profound appeal to improper authority, the authority being the editor in question"

I can see why he did it, I think you can't blame him entirely. We have a whole irrational damn-near religious awe of credentials and enormous stigma against those who do not possess this "sacred currency", if you don't have a degree you're "low cog" (lower down on the cognitive chain) and hence "less worthy". The fact is our culture worships the paper. You are deemed more or less worthy by how well you navigated some arbitrary designed academic obstacle course that may or most likely - may not have interested you because of the stale (or incorrect) way it was presented and the stifling of natural curiosity that happens in how children are taught today. Gatto as commented on this extensively.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

"A corporation exists to make money."

See, that's where you and many others go wrong. Historically, this is completely untrue. Corporations are "chartered" by the state to meet otherwise unmet social needs. If they fail to do so, the state has the right and responsibility to revoke their charters. It was understood that because corporations were large immortal beings without consciences or an ability to feel pain and without family or community ties that they needed to be kept on a very short leash. So, originally, corporations were only created for very narrow public purposes. The current state of related laws is an abomination of the original intent. While they are organizational demons made of people, the people do not control them any more than the cells in your body individually control you. And if you are in a role in a corporation and do not fulfill that role, you will be swapped out with as much emotion as you have when swapping out a burned out light bulb. The corporate demons created to serve humankind are now the masters.
See for example:
    "The History of the Corporation"
    http://www.astonisher.com/archives/corporation_int ro.html
Or:
    "TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation"
    http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoBeij.html
From the second link: """ The American colonists did not revolt simply over a tax on tea. The laborers, small farmers, traders, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics and landed gentry who sent King George III packing, feared corporations. As pamphleteer Thomas Earle was to write in 1823: "Chartered privileges are a burden, under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery." While American volunteers were routing the king's armies, they vowed to put corporations under democratic command. After the revolution, people were determined to keep investment and production decisions local and democratic. They believed corporations were neither inevitable nor always appropriate. Many colonial citizens argued that under the Constitution, no business could be granted special privileges. Others worded that once incorporators amassed wealth, they would use their corporate shields to control jobs and production, buy off the press and dominate elections and the courts. Craft and industrial workers feared absentee corporate owners would turn them into "a commodity being as much an article of commerce as woolens, cotton, or yarn," according to historian Louis Hartz. Having thrown off British rule, the revolutionaries delegated their elected state legislators to issue corporate charters on the people's behalf. For 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, citizen vigilance and activism forced legislators to keep corporations on a short civic leash." """

And of course your education was designed by corporation owners to keep you from thinking about this:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m

Don't be so hard on yourself. Your's was a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.

See:
    "Underground History of American Education"
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
"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."

Or:
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

This free school teaches all kids without coercion or drugs:
    http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml
"Though we are by no means a special school for problem children, we frequently serve as a safety net for children who have been falling through the cracks of the conventional education system. At any given time, approximately half of our students are referrals from the public and parochial schools. Our reputation with students that are struggling academically and/or behaviorally, and whose needs the system has failed to meet, is such that an increasing number of kids are coming to us having previously been tagged with labels like ADHD and placed on Ritalin and other biopsychiatric medications. Their parents seek us out because they're concerned about the side effects of the drugs and because they've heard that we work effectively with these children without drugs of any kind. Our active, flexible, individually structured environment renders the drugs entirely unnecessary."

Really? So do child labor laws actually exist to deny children the right to gainful employment?

Indeed, the intense fear of [a slave] insurrection seems to match the intensity of the collective denial about its cause. This is reminiscent of the countless school shooting plots "uncovered" over the past few years. While the culture continues to blame everything but schools for schoolyard massacres, paranoia increases, zero tolerance policies are applied oftentimes irrationally, and many kids' lives are being [ruined?] due to rumor, fear, or childish boasting of the sort that was once ignored.

Much like today's mainstream rush to blame Hollywood, the NRA, or other fuzzy outsiders for causing rage massacres that occur in offices and schoolyards, Americans, particularly Southerners right up to the late 1850's, blamed any slave unrest or rebellion on "outside agitators," whether on Northern abolitionist extremists or alien Jacobins. And they sincerely believed it. They couldn't even imagine that domestic conditions, that the very institution of slavery, caused slaves to rebel. It didn't make sense to them and those who suggested such a thing simply 'didn't understand.' To suggest that slavery as an institution and the South's culture caused black insurrection and violence was dangerous lunacy, an abolitionists was shunned and marginalized as today's Earth Liberation Front activists. (pg 46)

For more on your theme, see John Taylor Gatto:
    "Underground History of American Education"
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
"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."

But, lest you think this is a conspiracy:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m
" A Conspiracy Against Ourselves: Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."

See also:
    http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/colum nists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml
"I'll bring this down to Earth. Try to see than 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, film makers, 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 already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and die there. "

For more on your theme, see John Taylor Gatto:
    "Underground History of American Education"
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
"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."

But, lest you think this is a conspiracy:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m
" A Conspiracy Against Ourselves: Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."

See also:
    http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/colum nists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml
"I'll bring this down to Earth. Try to see than 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, film makers, 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 already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and die there. "

Universal education stems from a time when most people were illiterate and forced to work in the family (usually hard labor agrarian ) business.

Follow the links, as they substantiate what I said in my post. Literacy was near 100% in the colonies and early united States, wherever such a thing mattered. Then schools began experimenting on children with new methods of teaching reading ("whole word"), and literacy dropped like a brick.

Literacy in the 1930's army recruitment tests was 98% (voluntary enlistment). It dropped to 96% amongst WWII draftees, then to 81% amongst Korean war fighters, and to 73% by Vietnam.

Underground History, Ch.3
Slashdot Review of The Underground History of American Education

You do realize that the entire book is available online at Gatto's website for free, right? Link

Who educates the people who can't afford a private education?

My mother's parents couldn't afford to send her to Kindergarten (in 1950's Texas, Kindergarten cost extra), so they sent her to a caretaker's instead. It was cheaper than kindergarten, in that it allowed her mother to work full time.

Mom was bored out of her little mind at the caretaker's. With a little help from some slightly older children, she taught herself to read. But she learned a much more important lesson: If there was anything at all she wanted to learn, it was her responsibility to teach herself.

Government schools hurt children because they teach children that all knowledge comes from a higher authority.

Gatto gives examples of notable americans who educated themselves in an early chapter in his Underground History.

That's the entire problem right there. People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job [educate their children] for them, ...

Ah yes, the classic bait-and-switch technique. Government: "we're going to educate the children now, so every child gets a chance at developing to their full potential." Meanwhile, they're building an alternate set of "education railroad tracks" that lead to a land where illiteracy is the norm and 'the masses' (We the People) are easy to trick and control. Government goons take over the train's engine and throw the switch, all while proclaiming that all their schools need are a few superficial fixes to make them work right.

Maybe if I hadn't wasted all that time in the government's schools my analogy would be more coherent. John Gatto is very articulate in his trashing of the government school concept. Be sure to read (if you can, that is) /The Underground History of American Education/, and The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher.

The entire book is worth the time it takes to read it:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m

He comes at the issue from a particular mindset, so I don't always agree with him on minor bits of philosophy, but he's got the gist of it and has researched the history well.

See also the writings of John Holt; who after 20 years of trying to reform the system finally figured out that it was irredeamable by design and founded the modern home schooling movement:

http://www.holtgws.com/index.html

I was home schooled before John had his conversion and my family actually fled the country for the better part of a school year while the lawyer worked things out. One of the best experiences of my life.

KFG