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The US systemis filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind...

Teachers are very well paid for what they do, which is to prevent most their students from ever discovering personal power. Every single one of your classmates was "bored out of [their] mind" too - you just managed to find a way to make something of yourself, in spite of the government's attempt to dumb you down too. Most of our peers aren't quite so fortunate, for whatever reason.

Read Gatto's essay The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, or his book The Underground History of American Education (available for free online at his website).

Or one of Holt's books - How Children Fail or How Children Learn, for example (incidentally, is that your picture on the schoolbus? :).

The government school experiment is a good example of a cascading system failure. The first teachers came from classical american education, where learning was the learner's responsibility. The first school reform was to transfer responsibility for educational institutions from "the public" to "the government", and it's been all downhill from there.

The government school is corrupt because it places all responsibility for learning on the teacher. The first generation of government school students did well because their teachers had been "properly educated" in the traditional American manner. But every generation of teachers has been a little bit worse than the one before, because the system Doesn't teach children that it's their responsibility to teach themselves whatever they want to learn.

Now, 150 years later, many new teachers are frickin idiots. I had a date some years back with a girl who'd just gotten her teaching certificate, and felt sorry for whoever ended up in her class.

All part of a grand scheme to depower 'the masses' (that is, 'us').

John Taylor Gatto talks about it in his book The Underground History of American Education. A relevant page is this:

On the night of June 9, 1834... Even though the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98 percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent...

John Taylor Gatto talks about it in his book The Underground History of American Education. A relevant page is this:

On the night of June 9, 1834... Even though the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98 percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent...

John Taylor Gatto talks about it in his book The Underground History of American Education. A relevant page is this:

On the night of June 9, 1834... Even though the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98 percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent...

Related info from here:

"Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts 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. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?"

He was three times the NY City Teacher of the Year and once NY State Teacher of the Year. Here's a link to his bio on Wikipedia.

He has a website. Start here for a good stare into the abyss.


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WorldFact Is a new service for Australia's friends in the United States
World Fact #1:- John Howard is the Prime Minister of Australia.
WorldFact: Rubbing those two US brain cells together to see if we can generate warmth(let alone humanity)
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He was three times the NY City Teacher of the Year and once NY State Teacher of the Year. Here's a link to his bio on Wikipedia.

He has a website. Start here for a good stare into the abyss.


************
WorldFact Is a new service for Australia's friends in the United States
World Fact #1:- John Howard is the Prime Minister of Australia.
WorldFact: Rubbing those two US brain cells together to see if we can generate warmth(let alone humanity)
************

I want to address each of your items, but in reverse order.

First, vocations: ok. But, which vocation? There are plenty of people who work vocational jobs. Nurses, mechanics, IT, draftsmen, game testers - the list is pretty long and quite varied. Why don't people want to take these jobs? Well, namely, because they don't pay well enough to do much more than work, have kids, and die before you're rich enough to consider taking retirement (due to hard work). You're paid just enough to get you out of the 'poor' tax bracket, but not enough to eat better than the cheap meats at the grocery with canned veggies (if you've got the time for that - you're working 60 hours at the shop to make ends meet, afterall). And, there are a lot of reasons why these fields are becoming less appealing (not the least of which is the cost of overhead - mechanics usually own something like $50k in tools, each, which they have to furnish for themselves. just to name one field.)

Also, there simply aren't all that many 'vocational' jobs anymore. It takes less people to do the same job it did years ago in quite a few fields. draftsmen, 'laborers', IT, mechanics, and many other fields have all been made more 'efficient' in various ways (let's not get into the specifics, please). Not everyone can be an innovator, so you're left with two options if you follow the current course to its ultimate (one of three) conclusion:
1) a select few members of society maintain things (meaning everything), while the majority of mediocre and unmotivated people live off of hand-outs (because the society is really efficient that 10% can supply all the needs and desires for the other 90%) - don't ask me how this one would work
2) society collapses under the strain of people unable to find jobs they can do (not the course I'd prefer, but the one I see happening - see: Europe) but willing,
3) or there needs to be some re-balancing of the equation with more tasks reverting to manual trade skill execution instead of mechanical (something I can not see happening willingly, but being forced by a change in the supply of resources, such as oil) ....

Moving on: Schooling. Part of the problem by segregating people by ability and/or desire is that you then run into a situation where your bottom-rung people basically flunk out of life. Moving towards the middle, they have a little more ability and competence, but in general they're going to do the least possible amount of work (as would be natural for anyone in such a situation, and is in all but a few who are not necessarily the best or even above-average). As I'm tired, I'm not going to continue this train of thought, but I think you see where I' mgoing (if not, respond and I'll explain further).

That said, read this: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm (as others have recommended). It is what I and many others what we need to do.

...by John Taylor Gatto. Just by coincience I started reading one of his books yesterday.

Gatto "climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. " -http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

His books explain how there is a hidden cirriculum within the US compulsory schooling system. One example is that children are taught that things are disorderly. The current school system teaches math then switches to grammer then music etc. There is no connection or continuity between the dozens of topics that kids are taught during the day.

Take a tour for yourself.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
John Taylor Gatto argues that American education fails to properly educate because it was not designed to educate. It was designed to create good consumers.

Granted it's not like most people care nowadays. Look at any slashdot discussion on education, rather sad how people complain about having to take history (heck or any subject they're not "interested in deeply") in school. People want to be ignorant sheep.

History is interesting, school makes it suck: "In Year ABC, XYZ happened. Test next week - students who regurgitate well will get an 'A'."

People don't want to be sheep - totalitarian governments need populations to be docile. School is designed to suck the uniqueness out of children so, as adults, they'll take up a spot on a standardized assembly line.

Kinda cruel how the government has encouraged the shipping of assembly line jobs to China... Dumb down the population, then get rid of the reason for the dumbing-down.

See Gatto's Underground History, for example.

The Underground History of American Education

Read it.

If you would have read the post, you would have noticed that I don't believe credentials are sufficient for evaluating information. And if you had read the response to the AC, you would have seen the clarification on cites. I think you have jumped to a conclusion not warranted by the text. In fact, looking over your post, I see you have managed to exhibit 19 of the 83 common rhetorical fallacies (a couple more than once), and still miss the point: The founders of the Wikipedia hold the Wikipedia to be a reputable source of knowledge and information, yet some authors do not reveal their own expertise or biases. In fact, we have numerous instances where the authors have battled to change the content of articles to promote their own point of view without disclaimer, or to hide information inimical to their particular point of view. This problem, (I define a problem as a discrepancy between the way things are and the way I want them to be), is, IMO, something that could be resolved by a higher editorial policy. The Wikipedia is only a place to begin discussion, but it is not a reliable place to start discussion at this time. Although the majority of the articles have additional links, many times the links are selected for their bias rather than their objectivity.

Your point about trustability is well-taken. If I read something in the Wikipedia I want to know if it is a fact or an opinion. If it is a fact, I want to determine the probablility, "Is it true?" If it is an opinion, I want to know what the arguments are for and against the opinion. An argument should stand on its merits, but if I know a particular author of an article about Capitalism is a high-ranking member of the Socialist Workers Party, I am warned to examine the arguments a little closer. One strength of the Wikipedia is that a very biased article will probably get ammended or challenged pretty quickly. However, "article by consensus" is not really an unbiased source of information either.

As for the post-internet generation: I have seen no evidence that the internet has improved thinking and independent thought. Although somewhat of a ranter, John Taylor Gatto ( http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ ) has pointed out the deficiencies of our educational system. My interpretation of his writing is to conclude that the education system, particularly public schooling, suppresses independent, creative and objective thought. What I see personally on the internet, is a proliferation of what Sociologists term "crowd behavior", in which the intelligence exhibited by the crowd performs significantly below the average intelligence of the individual members. YMMV.

When I was a founder of a startup back in 1999 I had the opportunity to hire a 16 year old as an intern. (We also hired a 17 year old). Being a startup company in silicon valley we tried to get the most for our money, and these two certainly provided. I was able to lay out a very clear project description that was not too large, nor too small, along with a lot of strategy for implementation. The guy coded it up quite nicely, though I found myself lecturing him about coding style. Note that now he works at google and codes rings around me. We found out about him simply because his father knew a guy in our company. When I interviewed the kid he showed a 3D visualization program he'd written in C++. I checked out the code and it looked good enough. I had been a high school teacher (briefly) and could tell he was smart, and thought he'd be trainable, so we went for it. It was amazing what a good decision that turned out to be.

Interestingly, having been a teacher, I have very mixed feelings about education. I don't have a lot of faith in the educational system. See for instance "An Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/ for a critique. In regards to college, my advice is: if you want to go and you know what to focus on, then go. If you're not sure, or you'd like to take some time off to do something else for a while, then that is a much better choice. That's the route my daughter (now 21) took, and I think it served her as she is able to treat study more like a job, and less like high school with ashtrays.

And as to the military (as another poster mentioned): recruiters will tell you anything to lure you in and then you're a slave to the system--you have to do whatever they tell you to, and it's not usually what you want to do. Don't go over to the dark side; you'll do much better in civilian life.

Public education is underfunded.

Public schools do not educate, according to reformed schoolteachers like John Gatto and John Holt. If they did, the populace wouldn't take the crap that 'we' do - teh masses would know how to recognize tyranny when it happened, and find a way to circumvent it.

The government is in debt because of the tax "cuts" Bush pushed through.

The government has been in debt for a very long time - Johnson started printing money to pay for Vietnam, and there was no turning back. Clinton only balanced the budget by borrowing money from social security. If the government had to abide by the same accounting standards as corporations, there would have never been a 'surplus', and the current deficits would be much, much worse than the numbers they currently put out.

Our medical and college education costs are out of reach because ... because the government subsidizes college, and has sent all the low-skill jobs (that used to pay well) to Mexico and Asia, and has looked the other way while corporations imported Mexicans for the jobs that couldn't be moved. College has, therefore, become the new highschool diploma, not that the original ever meant anything in the first place...

we're spending our money on things like the War on Drugs(which just makes illegal drugs more expensive)

If not for the war on drugs driving up prices, how could the various black-op agencies finance their nefarious operations? Read something about Clinton being in on cocaine smuggling through Arkansas - seems like a possibility to me...

and the War on Terror(abject failure due to our inability to concentrate on the nation that actually caused the terror).

You are refering to the traitors in the whitehouse, right?

The United States has the lowest tax levels of the Western world. We also have the highest debt and the worst healthcare. There is a connection.

'Highest debt' is because our Feral Government has had free reign to "print" money for its various programs for 35+ years, and no one's had the ability to call them on it. See Ron Paul's The End of Dollar Hegemony.

'Worst healthcare' is because a certain kind of doctor lobbied themselves a monopoly, and the government set the rules such that employers paid their employees' healthcare bills (wage ceilings during WWII led companies to pick up their workers' doctor bills). Medicare was created to pay for retired workers who'd gotten accustomed to the 'health insurance' paradigm, and that program's costs have been spiraling out of control ever since. See 100 Years of Medical Robbery and Real Medical Freedom.

"The Underground History Of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto

If you're thinking about homeschooling your children, go read it. The entire book is there, online, for free. (just try not to slashdot it !)

i have said it before and i will say it again ..

i will however repeat myself because .. in my own life i have had the experience of telling people something over and over again .. until they get it ..

were upon the normal reaction is .. why didn't you say that before ..

were i could say i did .. but they will insist that i have not told them before .. etc. etc.

if you really want to understand what and why things are happening the way they are .. study the work of Stanley Milgram and John Taylor Gatto

http://www.stanleymilgram.com/

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

that and the fact that there is no were near enough resources for everyone in the world to enjoy an average american lifestyle .. about 1/4 to about 1/8 being the range .. 3 in 4 four to 7 in 8 need to die .. for it to happen ..

the level of control need/desired by the wealth/ruling class will only continue to increase .. and the water WARS will make the oil WARS seem like a warm up ..

and as Albert Einstein said " i do not know how the third world WAR will be fought .. but the fourth world WAR will be fought with sticks and stones .."

WAR=We Are Right

Here in America, that's the exact opposite of the goal of school. http://johntaylorgatto.com/

In many cultures, childhood ends at puberty. Thereafter comes adulthood. Call it probationary adulthood if you like, but the person was expected to act like an adult.

Today in the United States, we treat people as children until they're 18/21. In some states they're allowed to stop going to the government school at age 16, other states lock 'em up in the name of "educating" them. Is it any wonder that, as John Gatto points out, many people never really grow up?

Sure, monitor your pre-pubescent kids' instant messaging. But if you want your kids to ever grow up, you'll have to act like you expect them to.

I do know that the housing rush is due in part (or maybe entirely due to) the across-the-board drop in prices for consumer items. Thanks to cheap Chinese manufacturing ($35 microwave anyone?), Americans have a lot more room in their budgets to buy a house.

I always thought that exporting our manufacturing jobs was the method of "smarting up" the population. Seriously: why are any Americans still sitting at an assembly line, acting like robots?

Seems that the Chinese people don't need much in the way of mindful services provided by Americans. I think this is indicative of a problem. Do you?

No, they just can't afford our services. Yet.

Newsflash: U.S. economy is in BIG trouble.

Short history lesson: Federal reserve started to inflate the money supply in early 1995 (blue line in the graph). The 'tech bubble' followed a couple years later. That trend wasn't sustainable, and the dot-coms bombed sometime in 2000/2001. The economy was well on its way to a recession by late-summer/fall 2001. The Federal Reserve responded to "9/11" by cutting interest rates to 1% (over several months), supposedly for the purpose of 'stimulating' the economy.

Newsflash: Mismanagement of the U.S. currency has caused half of the economic equation, production, to move to Asia and Mexico, either in search of lower wages or to flee rising U.S. costs. This is not a new phenomena, and has been ongoing since the 1970's, though it is only recently (circa-2001) that that trend has accelerated to a completely unsustainable level. Cisco assembled their wireless access points in the U.S., and Intel made motherboards in Silicon Valley up until 1999/2000 or so. What happened to the Americans who used to be employed assembling motherboards and other electronics? Perhaps some of them moved to finance, and some to auto sales. But I digress...

Thus, when the Fed slashed interest rates starting in 2001, instead of entrepreneurs borrowing money to set up new production lines, individuals borrowed money to buy a bigger house. And an investment house. And a condo in the mountains. The widely-proclaimed 'housing bubble' started to take off ... circa 2002/2003, and reached its peak summer 2005. Crashes always follow bubbles, and the current real estate market is no exception.

Low interest rates also facilitated GM's 0% financing "keep america rolling" sales campaign. (don't remember what Ford & Chrysler called their corresponding 0% programs). But now Ford and General Motors are in trouble, because they can't sell new cars to customers whose credit line is maxed out.

Gonna get ugly, folks. The good news is that this coming transition marks the end of corporate wage-slavery. The economic system that will arise from the ashes will be founded with something along the lines of worker cooperatives. This is the worker benefiting from their own labor. No more slaving away to pay the "shareholders" dividends (mostly rich dudes who sit on their lazy asses and parasitically live off the working class).

John Gatto's book about the 'massification' of America fits in here too. Gatto maintains that the original american ideal was an independent livelihood. Blacksmith, farmer, woodworker, wheelmaker, etc. Mass production / standardization required government schools to produce a populace who would accept working a repetive job where someone else ("shareholder") was the primary beneficiary. Fun while it lasted, right? :)

Also see my recent comment, how the government spins the stats.

Glad to hear that you liked the essay. Gatto turned it into chapter 1 of his first book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. He's written several other books, including The Underground History of American Education, which is available for free at johntaylorgatto.com. I've A different kind of teacher too, and recommend all three.

There's also some videos available at www.edflix.org/gatto.htm

Nice to know that this morning's comment made a difference for someone. Thx. :)

Children are the last minority. A child can be tried for murder as an adult at 12, but cannot get a job or a means of taking adult responsibility. In Houston, the schools are already starting to look like prisons; fences, guards, security systems, etc.. With curfew, they are under House Arrest from 10:00PM 'til 6:00AM, thus making their incarceration more complete.

I lied about my age and joined the Army back in the '60's, and two months later had an Army GED. The State of Alaska granted me an actual Diploma when I turned 18. People used to laugh at people with GED's, but now you have to take a GED test before they will let you graduate (in Texas they call it TAKS), and it's not even as hard as the one I took back in the '60's! But if some kid showed up for his Freshman year of High School and passed the TAKS, do you think they'd let him graduate and get a job? NO! He still has to serve the rest of his sentence!

Just wait. The population of the US is getting older. It won't be too long before they lower the age at which young people can go to work to support the old folks on Social Security.

Check this out: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/multimedia/jtgsound _paradox.htm The rest of the site is pretty interesting also.

I was refering to how children are historically indoctrinated in the government schools. Gatto says in one of his books that history used to be taught as a narative - this happened, which lead to this this and that.

But all I learned in the government school were random facts. "On July 4th, 1776 the declaration of indepedance was signed", and so on.

Maybe you can relate better to the present "war of terror". If most people understood the long history of western involvement in the middle east (In the last 500 years, there hasn't been more than 5 consecutive years without christian troops stationed in the area, according to Richard Maybury, who has seen the present WWIII/WWIV brewing for over 20 years), most of us in the united States couldn't have been tricked into invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

Logic, critical thought, and reasoned argument are all missing from our current curriculum, on all levels. Until that changes, we're going to keep slipping.

America Is Massified

Older American forms of schooling would never have been equal to the responsibility coal, steam, steel, and machinery laid upon them. As late as 1890, the duration of the average school year was twelve to twenty weeks. Even with that, school attendance hovered between 26 and 42 percent nationwide with the higher figure only in a few places like Salem, Massachusetts.

Yet America had to be massified, and quickly. Since the end of the nineteenth century, American government and big business had been fully committed, without public fanfare, to creating and maintaining a mass society. Mass society demands tight administration, close management to an extreme degree. Humanity becomes undependable, dangerous, childlike, and suicidal under such discipline. Holding this contradiction stable requires managers of systematic schooling to withdraw trust, to regard their clientele as hospital managers might think of potentially homicidal patients. Students, men under military discipline, and employees in post offices, hospitals, and other large systems are forced into a condition of less than complete sanity. They are dangerous,[4] as history has shown again and again.

There are three indisputable triumphs of mass society we need to acknowledge to understand its strength: first, mass production offers relative physical comfort to almost all--even the poor have food, shelter, television as a story-teller to raise the illusion of community; second, as a byproduct of intense personal surveillance in mass society (to provide a steady stream of data to the producing and regulating classes) a large measure of personal security is available; third, mass society offers a predictable world, one with few surprises--anxieties of uncertainty are replaced in mass society with a rise in ennui and indifference.

[4] When I first began to write this section, another of the long stream of post office massacres of recent years had just taken place in New Jersey. Vengeance by a disgruntled employee. In the same state a hospital attendant has been charged with murdering as many as a hundred of his patients by lethal injection, also a more common occurrence than we want to imagine, and two rich boys at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the site of a much-boasted-of scientific management revolution in 1994, had shot and killed thirteen of their classmates before taking their own lives. Human variation cannot be pent up for long in enormous synthetic systems without striving to somehow assert the "I" of things. Massified populations cannot exercise self-control very well since they depend on constant oversight to behave as required. When external controls are removed, anything becomes possible.

-Underground History of American Education, ch8 (emphasis added)

Holt often failed at getting his students to learn what, according to the curriculum, they were supposed to learn, but he was determined to figure out why. He soon became as interested in the reasons for the failure as he had been in the original task of following the curriculum. Team teaching allowed him long periods of simply observing the children, trying to experience the classroom as they experienced it rather than as he imagined they were experiencing it. He was surprised and puzzled to find that most of the children in his classroom were bored and frightened, intent only on figuring out what the teachers wanted and whether or not they should try to give it to them. The classroom was not the place of active learning and exploration that Holt had imagined it to be.

    To the thousands and millions of readers of How Children Fail (1964) who found in the book confirmation of their own school experience, Holt was one of the first to see through educational jargon and theory and to write about what life in school was really like for children and teachers. People reading it and remembering their own childhoods found, often for the first time, someone who said that disliking school made sense. Students and teachers who had suspected that something was wrong but had not been able to say what it was found someone who could articulate it for them. ...

-from Susannah Sheffer's introduction to John Holt's A Life Worth Living, pg 2-3 (emphasis added)

Except the real solution is to get rid of compulsory schooling entirely and get people doing "unschooling",
    http://www.unschooling.com/
and upgrade libraries and turn school buildings into learning centers (or democratically run "free schools"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
for those children whose parents cannot afford to supervise their children during the day directly).

See for example John Holt's writings:
    http://www.holtgws.com/index.html
or John Taylor Gatto's:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
or any of many other radical school reformers.

All your suggestions sound good on paper but miss the point that people have tried for decades to reform schools incrementally and they are still broken -- or rather, they actually are still performing the mission they were designed for, which is dumbing kids down into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and gullible consumers so they will fit well into a well ordered industrial economy, a mission now obsolete in a post-industrial and post-scarcity information age.

The future is not to still idealize Prussia and even earlier empire building aspirations back to Plato
    http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20 031028151034651
which developed these techniques of "education" but instead to look into the future, where people start asking questions like "why work?"
    http://www.whywork.org/
and how to structure an economy when "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain":
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

(Sorry to read about your loss, and it sounds like you were doing a lot of great things together, just needed more time to go even further.)

You see, I thought too that kids could do this and I was confronted with 16+ year olds that had no concept of a variable.

"you too can become rich if you work hard and play by our rules"....bullshit.

Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get?
Boney fingers. Boney fingers.

-Hoyt Axton

This is because of the way our schools and news are used to bombard us as citizens and our children, to teach us to be "good little consumers"

Here's an interesting site I found after my last round of dissing our schools. I don't completely agree with him, but he's got the gist of it:

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

KFG

The reason that this crap works is that most of the citizenry is unable to follow a valid argument, neither on an informal nor formal level. Informally, can you distinguish between the 83 Rhetorical Fallacies? (Read "Attacking Faulty Reasoning" by Damer, if it's not too much work. Did you notice the three Rhetorical Fallacies contained in my first sentence?) In his book, "Dumbing Us Down", John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ says that if you picked up a 5th grade book on Rhetoric or Arithmetic from the 1850's, some of the content is equivalent to what is now being withheld until college.

And think about this: Al Gore's movie is built on the same premise; that people are too stupid and/or too lazy to follow rational argument. Another example would be Michael Moore's movie. While he claims that there are no "factual" discrepanciews in his movie, Moore's presentation of relying on out-of-context snippets and arrangements bypasses any rational thought, and promotes a whole movie of ad hominem argument. Moore could be the most successful propagandist since Hermann Goering.

7. ONE CAN'T HIDE

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn't likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.

I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework," so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.

The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.

-John Taylor Gatto, The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher

... But his [Mann's] contention is that this spirit of the system is separable from the manner of teaching itself. And here American teachers can learn much.

The Prussian schoolmaster, he [Mann] discovered, combined complete mastery of subject matter with superb pedagogical finesse. They taught from "the head," never relying on a textbook. Beginning not with abstract theories -- neither principles, rules, nor axioms -- but with objects and phenomena familiar to each child, these master teachers encompassed elements of reading, spelling, writing, grammar, drawing, and general information into every lesson. Students in the Prussian schools, unhampered by the artificial formalisms of rote memorization, enjoyed learning; the liked their teachers and held them in high esteem. The teachers rarely used physical punishment; they secured discipline through the affection and respect -- even awe -- the students had for them. The Prussian schoolmaster was the complete authority; children unquestionably accepted and believed what he said.

Horace Mann dreamed of making American teachers as authroitative as their Prussian counterparts. ... (Perkinson pg. 77. Italics in original, bold my emphasis)

In the hundred years or so in the 20th century, the majority of Americans learned to read well (functional literacy).

Dude, it isn't just the states. It's almost every Western Civilization that adopted modern schooling. John Taylor Gatto explains it in terrificant detail and clear prose. Have a look at it.

Schools place too much emphasis on obedience, without teaching kids anything about thinking for themselves.

the hell out of the american school system if you can.
Home schooling is your friend.

Of particular interest to you may be John Gatto's book,
The Underground History of American Education.

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

See John Taylor Gatto's writings for the larger story of how compulsaory schooling was created 150 years ago to turn independent minded US citizens into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
These are the real lessons any school teacher really teaches:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
From there:
"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."

NYS "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto suggests the whole thing is a sham from K through 12 and beyond -- designed precisely to make people submissive factory workers, mindless consumers, and obedient soldiers:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m

On the large topic, while I agree with you on someplace like Simon's Rock beinggn worthy of support given the educational system we have now, I think this "donation" shows the folly of a certain type of monetary philanthropy.

Spend your life essentially suppressing innovation in software (and when you can't suppress it, buy it) like Gates, or spend your life making corporate sharks smarter like Buffet, and then think you can make the world a better place by essentially propping up a failed idea like compulsory schooling or subsidizing big Pharma?

Just shows how out of touch the biggest players running much of the US economy are with the worlds needs. If you ask the people in Africa, they say they want sewage systems and working economies and political systems (other than the sham ones left over from European colonialism or US corporate-friendly interventions) more than Polio vaccinations. And yes, people have asked, there was a New Yorker article on this Polio vaccination issue a couple years back, specifically talking about Africans' comments how money would be more cost effective spent on getting raw sewage out of the streets rather than vaccination, but the money was earmarked by charities only for vaccination. Most of the improvements in public health in the developed world have resulted from better nutrition and better sanitation and cleaner water.

The deep problem is that that the things the world desperately needs -- truly innovative people, free-as-in-freedom software and content, sustainable decentralized economies, flexible distributed manufacturing of most goods and information, are the very things the people with the most wealth in the world have been fighting against their whole working lives (to make sure they get most of the profits of a centralized system). Why think they might suddenly wake up when they get old?

National security has similar problems -- hard to get a central govenment dominated by the interests of big centralized power structures to admit that any concentration of power and materials poses an inherent security risk which may outweight the profitability to a few of the centralization.

Sounds like a case of "group think" here to me. Sad to see Buffet get sucked into it, but just because you are good at one thing like earning money, does not mean you are good at another, like effectively giving it away or choosing those who can. Sad to hear his wife did not get her chance to play a role in that -- sounds like she might have done it really well.

Libertarians need to learn some marketing. From what I can tell, they are the party that supports selling off all roads and sidewalks, essentially abolishing the right to travel.

Indeed, if that's your impression, then marketing certainly isn't working.

So what did people do before the government owned all the highways? They built them themselves. Look up "turnpike" in a history book, and be amazed.

They seem to be inconsistent in some messages (i.e., they are pro-business, when they should be for limitations on corporations based of how they describe liberty).

Limitations of what? Do you really mean, allowing the people who own and run organizations to be held responsible for their "organization's" actions? That isn't pro- or anti-business, that's anti government-granted-limited-liability.

Why should I change if public roads work so good?

They do? As someone stuck in traffic on the only road between A and B some time.

Yes, public schools are cheaper than private.

Actually, they're not. The public schools spend more than $10,000 per student, per year, every year, and it's only going up. Private schools charge far less than that, and get better academic performance on every measurement. Homeschoolers spend a fraction of that and beat public and private schools.

Try http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ for a little background on the subject of "public" education.

If you like video instead of reading, try doing a little bit of piracy and finding "ABC's 20/20 Stupid In America". While John Stossel comes down hard in favor of vouchers, the reasons why are what will shock you to your boots if you are paying attention.

Social Security is run with a lot less overhead than Wall Street funds doing the same T-bill investments.

Social Security is not an investment at all, it's a ponzi scheme. Present beneficiaries are being paid out of present donations. There is no trust fund, there is no set-aside, the money goes into and comes out of the general fund.

The only reason SS is said to "cost less" is because the government doesn't include sallaries of government employees or costs of the buildings and facilities in their "cost" estimates.

When the Libertarian message gets me benefits (and I think those that run can manage to impliment their ideas), I might consider them.

Those lists of benefits are out there. http://www.fff.org/ http://www.lewrockwell.com/ http://www.mises.org/ http://www.cato.org/ http://www.pennradio.com/

If the only information you are listening to comes from government, as your statements of "fact" indicates, then no wonder you have a bad impression of "libertarians".

Until then, they are the party for government-hating gun nuts (and no, people that support the 2nd Amendment aren't gun nuts, the people that get upset they can't have their Desert Eagle strapped to their hip wandering around their children's kindergarden are gun nuts).

When someone comes to the school your child is in and starts killing them (even though murder is illegal) with whatever weapon they choose to use (regardless of any law to the contrary), you'd better pray that some principled gun owner who chose not to be disarmed by law is there to stop them. ...like what happened in Pearl, Mississippi, when a killer decided to visit a "gun free zone". Oh, you didn't hear about that? Then may I suggest http://www.johnrlott.com/ _The Bias Against Guns_ by John R. Lott?

But that would re

You've been reading John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education (full text link), I see. Great book!

Liked your comment, but I think you're missing something.

In Secrets of Power, Vol. 1, Ingo Swann talks about how social institutions have been set up to "depower" the masses. (Mr. Swann is something of a word nazi and notes that "depower" is not yet in the dictionary, but that it should be. It refers to how an individual loses his Power. The book is heavy heavy reading, so I don't recommend it - I've only been able to skim through it.)

This is especially obvious in the perennially broken government schools. John Taylor Gatto tells us that the government schools were specifically set up to depower the population (to use Mr. Swann's word), and make them (us) suitable for factory work. Pre-government school, the american ideal was an independant livelihood. Post-government school, most people hope for a good job with a good company with good benefits.

One of the side-effects of depowerment, is that people don't realize their creative potential. If the government schools taught people to use their power of creativity, more would figure out, like you, that the rat race isn't worth running.

Also see my other comment in this story, about hidden inflation and making your own food.

Underground History of American Education

Big brother comments aside, I would welcome a computer that could read my facial expressions, track my eyes, and interact more on a non-verbal, non-keyboard level. This could be a big boon to education. I'd love to have something like this to accelerate student learning: The computer uses software analogous to programmed instruction married to Lozanov's suggestopedia, and when the monitor neural net detects the optimal moment of attention/relaxation, it presents the material to be learned....

Whoops, that DOES sound like brain-washing, but it's more effective than the current school system....http://www.johntaylorgatto.com./

Mike

Government schools had done you good. John Gatto must be right when he says their program is specifically designed to prevent people from learning how to extract meaning from text.

Osteopath?!?!? Let's all be clear on this, you're advocating CHIROPRACTIC...

An OSTEOPATH is NOT a Chiropractor. Why do you equate the two professions? I went to 5 or 7 different chiropractors, and they're all in the dark ages as compared to my OSTEOPATH.

My OSTEOPATH has NEVER, EVER cracked any of my bones. Most the time I can't tell that he's done anything at all. Then I notice that something's slightly better later in the day, or later in the week. Incremental improvement. It's been slow, but totally worthwhile.

Hey, no hard feelings. I made the same mistake myself. I decided I needed an osteopath who did manipulation, but believed that manipulation had died out and today's D.O.s were functionally equivalent to M.D.s. So I went to a chiropractor, then another and another. But there was a little nagging voice that said "you need an OSTEOPATH, dipshit!" And later that week I told an M.D. at a booksigning how I'd decided I needed to see an Osteopath. He asked why, I told him ("hands don't work, ala Carpal Tunnel or RSI or thoracic outlet syndrome"), he asked if I'd tried something else (I had), then said that Osteopathic treatment might be right for me, and whenever HE needed an osteopath he went to this guy 100 miles away.

P.S. please read my two /. posts linked to in the grandparent.

It's a multifaceted problem, and no solution is readily available.

The way I see it, the problem is by design. It's well known that there's been a lot of "media consolidation" over the past few decades, so that the major outlets are controlled in the hands of a few corporations (e.g. Clearchannel).

John Taylor Gatto tells us in his books & presentations that the government's schools were set up to provide workers for industry. Before government schools, the American dream was an independant livelihood. After government schools, the expectation shifted to finding employment with a good company with good benefits.

The problem is that the same group of people are behind both efforts. Is it really so odd to propose that a small, dedicated group of families has been steadily concentrating wealth in their own pockets for centuries?

Furthermore, why is it that the same group of rotten scoundrels install themselves in government? George H. W. Bush was in the CIA at least as far back as the 60's. Head of the CIA, Vice President for 8 years, president for another 4.

Donald Rumsfeld was in the Nixon, Ford & Reagan administrations, according to Wikipedia. He even got his picture taken with Saddam Hussein back in 1983. Now he's secretary of defense. Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Papa Bush, and before that he got himself elected as representative from Wyoming.

I'm sure there are more examples. The problem, as I see it, is that the same rotten bastards keep getting recycled through the political system. Watch for the keywords: Project for the New American Century, Bilderburg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc... And that's not even mentioning the more secretive enclaves. See The Controllers: Secret Rulers of the World for a timeline of the consolidation of power over the last 100+ years.

What's more, anytime this sort of observation comes up, the masses have been conditioned to just snicker and dismiss the messenger as a "conspiracy theorist". But how do said masses know that there is no conspiracy? They don't "know", but social conditioning has implanted a nearly impervious belief.

Expose the so-called "illuminati" and their plots, and the problem will begin to go away.

Chapter Three - Eyeless In Gaza

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.

The National Adult Literacy Survey represents 190 million U.S. adults over age sixteen with an average school attendance of 12.4 years. The survey is conducted by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey. It ranks adult Americans into five levels. Here is its 1993 analysis:

      1. Forty-two million Americans over the age of sixteen can't read. Some of this group can write their names on Social Security cards and fill in height, weight, and birth spaces on application forms.

      2. Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth- and fifth-grade level. They cannot write simple messages or letters.

      3. Fifty-five to sixty million are limited to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade reading. A majority of this group could not figure out the price per ounce of peanut butter in a 20-ounce jar costing $1.99 when told they could round the answer off to a whole number.

      4. Thirty million have ninth- and tenth-grade reading proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot understand a simplified written explanation of the procedures used by attorneys and judges in selecting juries.

      5. About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today. This last fact alone should warn you how misleading comparisons drawn from international student competitions really are, since the samples each country sends are small elite ones, unrepresentative of the entire student population. But behind the bogus superiority a real one is concealed.

      6. Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for other people to interpret information for us.

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."[3] What would that prove? You've heard those stories, read these figures [-] 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? ...

All alleged reforms have left schooling exactly in the shape they found it, except bigger, richer, politically stronger. And morally and intellectually worse by the standards of the common American village of yesteryear which still lives in our hearts. Many people of conscience only defend institutional schooling because they can't imagine what would happen without any schools, especially what might happen to the poor. This compassionate and articulate contingent has consistently been fronted by the real engineers of schooling, skillfully used as shock troops to support the cumulative destruction of American working-class and peasant culture, a destruction largely effected through schooling. ...

School wreaks havoc on human foundations in at least eight substantive ways so deeply buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any other way for children to grow up:

1) The first lesson schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like walking and talking. This is done so pleasantly and painlessly that the one area of schooling most of us would agree has few problems is elementary school--even though it is there that the massive damage to language-making occurs. Jerry Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor "Student as Nigger" and developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we forced children to learn to walk with the same methods we use to force them to read, a few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk indifferently, without pleasure, and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push to extend "day care" further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders.

2) The second lesson schools teach is bewilderment and confusion. Virtually nothing selected by schools as basic is basic, all curriculum is subordinate to standards imposed by behavioral psychology, and to a lesser extent Freudian precepts compounded into a hash with "third force" psychology (centering on the writings of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow). None of these systems accurately describes human reality, but their lodgement in university/business seven-step mythologies makes them dangerously invulnerable to common-sense criticism.

None of the allegedly scientific school sequences is empirically defensible. All lack evidence of being much more than superstition cleverly hybridized with a body of borrowed fact. Pestalozzi's basic "simple to complex" formulation, for instance, is a prescription for disaster in the classroom since no two minds have the same "simple" starting point, and in the more advanced schedules, children are frequently more knowledgeable than their overseers--witness the wretched record of public school computer instruction when compared to self-discovery programs undertaken informally. Similarly, endless sequences

GUTIERREZ: Alex told me he did go to preschool once. It didn't go well.

ALEX KANSTUL, 5 YEARS OLD: School is terrible. They tell you raise your hands and it's actually a really, really terrible place.

GUTIERREZ: Do you learn more at home, do you think?

KANSTUL: Yes, yes, yes, I learn a lot, lot more.

GUTIERREZ: What's your favorite thing to do during the day?

KANSTUL: Go shopping on the computer.

GUTIERREZ: Alex is only 5, but check out his computer skills.

KANSTUL: You go into Internet Explorer, also know as Google. ...

Sorry, no cigar!

I know people who were married by 15 and holding down full-time jobs to support a family. Treating everyone as if there was a real line instead of an imaginary line for maturity levels deprives early maturity of the opportunity to conduct themselves at a mature level. We have a system (US) that will prosecute a 13-year-old as an adult for committing a murder, but no mechanism for enabling a 13-year-old to conduct themselves as an adult in other areas, such as holding a job, creating credit, etc., etc...

One of the older books I read by a futurist (named marvin? something?...ticks me off that I can't find the book and can't find a reference by search engine!) said that if you want to see what the US will be like in 20 years, look at Sweden today. One of the predictons was that kids would be experimenting with sex at the age of 10-11, because the dangers were known and sex was safer. Lo, and behold, in the last year I've seen about 4 books purporting to help cope with the appearance of sexually active pre-teens. We have kids of that age in the most violent areas of our society committing brutal crimes. We have thousands of runaways and throwaways living on the streets and coping in less-than-optimal ways because we have no cultural mechanism for them to advance positively. If you have a teenager, ask them if they know of anyone in their age group who has run away or otherwise been forced to cope for themselves independently at an early age. (Don't press for details...it's none of your business, and you will only diminish communications.) And we think we are protecting people by rating GAMES? This is simply another example of creating a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. It is based on a gross generalization, in turn based on false or poorly-researched assumptions, designed to produce imagined results which cannot be proven as consequenses of the action. Think about it: If you restrict games to a 15-year old, what positive consequences do you expect? ..and what research leads you to believe that these consequences are directly related to the action?

I would rather see more gratuitous sex in games than gratuitous violence. (The same goes for movies and music.) I don't think you develop mature adults through keeping them ignorant, but ignorant people are possibly more easily controlled, and certainly more susceptible to advertising. Here's a link on "extended chilhood" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/multimedia/jtgsound _paradox.htm
You might also find the rest of the site interesting.

Mike Burke

MEB