Slashdot Mirror

... school teachers have to say about schooling vs education in the USA.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...

http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...

http://www.holtgws.com/whatisu...

We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.

Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.

See also by John Taylor Gatto:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.worldtrans.org/whol...
"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.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know."

More by John Taylor Gatto (1992 New York State Teacher of the year) here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...

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

Also: http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a for

We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.

Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.

See also by John Taylor Gatto:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.worldtrans.org/whol...
"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.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know."

More by John Taylor Gatto (1992 New York State Teacher of the year) here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...

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

Also: http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a for

I have had to interview numerous High School graduates and Junior College attendees who were so bad at math they couldn't run a cash register. What evidence is there to indicate that "schooling" over the summer is a benefit to them or Society at large?

Although I object to his lack of citations, real proof, and his use of innuendo and other false arguments, I strongly agree that John Taylor Gatto http://johntaylorgatto.com/ is right: The American Education system is irrevocably broken and must be redesigned from scratch. The school system is (WARNING!:GROSS GENERALIZATION AHEAD!) something where you send your kids to prison during the working hours to have their heads messed with by persons only marginally capable of feeding themselves .

OK, I agree that there are SOME dedicated and competent teachers, but I suspect they are working in an environment that systematically sabotages their best efforts. It is also true that some students do well in spite of the average school environment. These anomalous students maybe have access to better schools, better teachers, and better parents.

The idea of making students go to school year-around is case of "jumping-to-solutions" and avoids any real thinking about "How can we improve our educational system?"

https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."

And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."

And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""

Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org

https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."

And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."

And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""

Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org

https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."

And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."

And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""

Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org

... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.

You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student. ..."

Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!

See:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. ..."

That said, investments in groups like Khan Academy seem worthwhile... One of the few really good Gates Foundation investments perhaps...
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...

The Broad Foundation is making the exact same mistake as Zuckerberg...
http://www.broadcenter.org/

An alternative by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point f

... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.

You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student. ..."

Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!

See:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. ..."

That said, investments in groups like Khan Academy seem worthwhile... One of the few really good Gates Foundation investments perhaps...
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...

The Broad Foundation is making the exact same mistake as Zuckerberg...
http://www.broadcenter.org/

An alternative by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point f

100% Agree. I've shipped numerous games and am completely disgusted at "eSports". Sitting on your ass all day gaming is not a "sport." Sports involving, you know, going gasp outside getting some physical activity.

Students should be doing a balance of mental and physical activities: Mathematics, Philosophy, Science, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Music/Singing, Checkers/Chess/Go, Sports that involve physical activities -- even Martial Arts/Yoga; all with a focus on:

* Inspiring people to pursue their passion
* Critical Thinking

not chasing after the latest dumb fad(s).

Who are overpaid the most in society? Entertainers that no one will give a shit about in 50 years.
Who are the most important people in society? Teachers that inspire thousands of students.
What is the pay difference between entertainers and teachers? Why does pay tend to be proportionally to how useless you are to society??

This is nothing new of course:

A Mathematician's Lament
* http://www.maa.org/sites/defau...

And

Underground History of American Education
* http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...

Great pattern you've discovered for a rebuttal.

Step 1. Ad hominem attack.
Step 2. Make vague references to vast numbers of rebutting examples without actually supplying any.
Step 3. More ad hominem.
Step 4. Ignore actual citations (like in Tart's latest book).
Step 5. Claim area is under study by reputable people without naming any.
Step 6. Profit? :-)

== Some links related to healthy democratic education reform

BTW, from 2006, not that I agree with most of their business-oriented recommendations:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/...
"That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."

Reform in what direction? We didn't get where we are today in public schooling without a hugenumber of powerful interlocking factions, as explained here:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals aren't distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving a system loyally and serving the public that it is finally overwhelming. Indeed, it isn't hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentive exists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth."

Chris Mercogliano, previously of the Albany Free School, is an example of a true reformer, with 30+ years of success including with some of the toughest kids rejected by mainstream schools, a success almost almost totally ignored:
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...

Or on homeschooling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional developm

https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."

Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/

Another person active in this field of consciousness studies is Charles Tart (unrelated to PU, but interesting in the field).
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/...

Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart:
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...

Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism".
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a...
"His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."

Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. ... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility an

http://www.thecaseagainsthomew...
"Bavo to Bennett and Kalish for having the courage to say what many of us know to be true! By connecting the dots in new ways, they make a strong case against the value of homework. This book serves as an indispensable tool for parents who want to get serious about changing homework practices in their schools."

Grades are bad too:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teach...

As is compulsory schooling in general (which could be replaced by a basic income from birth so parents can hire tutors, pay for private school, go on trips, and/or homeschool/unschool):
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

Posting to undo mistaken mod.

I left high school in the middle of 11th grade for much the same reasons. In general, unschooling/homeschooling are a great option for many people of all sorts of ability. A "basic income" could also replace compulsory schooling:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

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

By the way, Gatto points out the "gifted" label itself is a scam:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"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. Thatâ(TM)s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isnâ(TM)t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We donâ(TM)t need state-certified teachers to make education happenâ"that probably guarantees it wonâ(TM)t."

And also by Gatto:
http://www.bartlebyproject.com...
"By 1973, schools were big business. In small towns and cities across the land schoolteaching was now a lucrative occupation - with short hours, long vacations, paid medical care, and safe pensions; administrators earned the equivalent of local doctors, lawyers, and judges. Eccentricity in classrooms was steeply on the wane, persecuted wherever it survived. Tracking was the order of the day, students being steered into narrower and narrower classifications supposedly based on standardized test scores. Plentiful exceptions existed, however, in the highest classifications of "gifted and talented," to accommodate the children of parents who might otherwise have disrupted the smooth operation of the bureaucracy. But even in these top classifications, the curriculum was profoundly diminished from standards of the past. What was asked of prosperous children in the 1970s would have been standard for children of coal miners and steel workers in the 1940s and 1950s. "

More here:
http://homeschooladvocate.org/...

And it gets even worse, by others:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
"The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary,

Posting to undo mistaken mod.

I left high school in the middle of 11th grade for much the same reasons. In general, unschooling/homeschooling are a great option for many people of all sorts of ability. A "basic income" could also replace compulsory schooling:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

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

By the way, Gatto points out the "gifted" label itself is a scam:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"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. Thatâ(TM)s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isnâ(TM)t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We donâ(TM)t need state-certified teachers to make education happenâ"that probably guarantees it wonâ(TM)t."

And also by Gatto:
http://www.bartlebyproject.com...
"By 1973, schools were big business. In small towns and cities across the land schoolteaching was now a lucrative occupation - with short hours, long vacations, paid medical care, and safe pensions; administrators earned the equivalent of local doctors, lawyers, and judges. Eccentricity in classrooms was steeply on the wane, persecuted wherever it survived. Tracking was the order of the day, students being steered into narrower and narrower classifications supposedly based on standardized test scores. Plentiful exceptions existed, however, in the highest classifications of "gifted and talented," to accommodate the children of parents who might otherwise have disrupted the smooth operation of the bureaucracy. But even in these top classifications, the curriculum was profoundly diminished from standards of the past. What was asked of prosperous children in the 1970s would have been standard for children of coal miners and steel workers in the 1940s and 1950s. "

More here:
http://homeschooladvocate.org/...

And it gets even worse, by others:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
"The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary,

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teach...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

So much of the discussion of schooling misses the deeper point about the horrible legacy of "Prussian Schooling" and the enormous cost of it in diminished psyches. More humane lternatives are possible.

From the first link above:
-------
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
"You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way of compelling them to pay attention or do the assigned readings - and they may even use surprise quizzes for that purpose, keeping their grade books at the ready.
    Frankly, we ought to be worried for these teachers' students. In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading. ...
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. ...
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. ...
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. ...
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective. ...
5. Grades distort the curriculum. ...
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. ...
7. Grades encourage cheating. ...
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students. ...
9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other. ...
    Most of us are directly acquainted with at least some of these disturbing consequences of grades, yet we continue to reduce students to letters or numbers on a regular basis. Perhaps we've become inured to these effects and take them for granted. This is the way it's always been, we assume, and the way it has to be. It's rather like people who have spent all their lives in a terribly polluted city and have come to assume that this is just the way air looks - and that it's natural to be coughing all the time.
    Oddly, when educators are shown that it doesn't have to be this way, some react with suspicion instead of relief. They want to know why you're making trouble, or they assert that you're exaggerating the negative effects of grades (it's really not so bad - cough, cough), or they dismiss proven alternatives to grading on the grounds that our school could never do what others schools have done.
    The practical difficulties of abolishing letter grades are real. But the key question is whether those difficulties are seen as problems to be solved or as excuses for perpetuating the status quo. The logical response to the arguments and data summarized here is to say: "Good heavens! If even half of this is true, then it's imperative we do whatever we can, as soon as we can, to phase out traditional grading." Yet many people begin and end with the problems of implementation, responding to all this evidence by saying, in effect, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we'll never get rid of grades because . . .""

AC wrote: "A post-scarcity society, where labor becomes decoupled from the product, would result in a society of manically depressed people who are simply to bored to live."

People keep saying variants of this, and there may even be some truth to it for some US Americans whose whole notion of self-esteem has come to be associated with their job or their income. However, in general, being a good parent (or grandparent), a good neighbor, a good friend, a good volunteer, and a good citizen and informed voter can take about as much time as people can put into it. So, I think people who suggest this probably have little experience trying to actively do those sorts of things to any great extent (especially parenting young children).

As another counter-example, young children are able to keep themselves amused with something a s simple as a cardboard box. Also, as yet another counter-example, most people used to have to be farmers (90% 200 years ago), but now that essentially nobody (2%) is a farmer in the US, gardening is the most popular outdoor hobby. Likewise, now what manufacturing jobs are going away (down from about 35% to 15% over the past 50 years), the Maker movement is resurging and people are playing with Arduino and home 3D printers.

Many people can find endless things to do for personal reasons if they want to and are not already beaten down by some oppressive regime (and often even if they were, and have time and support to recuperate). In your own example, you point out older people taking different approaches to free time. If someone is feeling ill and listless amidst abundance and free time, it is more likely due to lack of vitamin D, lack of adequate iodine, lack of Omega 3s, lack of enough fruits and vegetables, lack of enough sleep, lack of enough exercise, lack of enough community, too much junk food, too much of other addictive stuff, etc..

Look at it this way -- as Marshall Sahlin's wrote, hunter/gatherers worked short hours (with little supervision) and were the original "affluent society". So, some of this would just be returning to the better parts of that model.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/a...
"Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week."

Still, it is true that a nation of schooled individuals, taught always to do what they are told and only what they are told, may have trouble making the transition back to freedom and self-direction.
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

And it seems true that challenge, mastery, and purpose are essential to true motivation (see Dan Pink's RSA Animate talk on motivation). The question is, in a world of robots than can do everything humans can and more, will humans still find challenge, mastery and purpose?
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I suggest they will, at the very least by raising children, learning new skills, being social, and making their own fun. However, even Iain Banks in the Culture Series has to invent a "Special Circumstances" group for people who wanted a big

No. Learning to code is necessary for only a small part of the population, although I bet most on Slashdot have tried a bit of coding.

I don't think there is any subject important enough that I would recommend everyone learn it. Although on the other hand, it is easy to come up with arguments why this subject and that subject is useful.

Unfortunately, the education system is not designed to be ideal environment for learning, far from it. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...

The key problem is teaching subjects kids are not interested in at the time it is taught. Very few kids have the option of learning things in school in the order they want. Gobs of time is wasted trying to shove down information kids are not motivated to learn.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte's challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther's plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn't didn't. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as 1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world's highest per capita income in the world.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt's brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the exp

It depends on which level of "education" you are talking about because it sure the hell isn't critical thinking these days!

"A Mathematician's Lament"
http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf

and

"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

Education comes from the latin word "Educare" which means "To draw out that which lies within" not the "fill up with useless facts" paradigm that the current establishment loves.

--
I have professionally shipped games on DS, PS1, PS2, PS3, PC, and Wii.

His message is that the eduction system is designed not to education. His Underground History of American Education is available full text online. http://news.slashdot.org/story/04/09/06/1722203/the-underground-history-of-american-education http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ He has other books that are easier reads if you choose.

What or who should you revere? That is a good question you may spend a lifetime answering... From Albert Einstein:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

On broader change to make economics work for more people, see stuff like:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

On the pitfalls of academia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

There are many spheres of life. Or as another analogy, life is like a city with lots of different districts and back alleys and night clubs and homes. Even if conventional academia is not your forte, you might find others where you can build a meaningful life that is a healthy success (parenting, being a good friend or neighbor, etc.). Many inventors did not "fit in", so you might fund some other creative niche outside of the formal academic related career path.

For many people, the promise of academics has become a scam. However, diplomas are still used as gatekeepers to many jobs. For a deeper view of the scam in progress, see thsibook (free online) by John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

And this:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Anyway, I sympathize with your feeling and frustrations. Even with a dipl

Are they trying to create an entire class of socially maladjusted kids?

Yes.

We have too many people who are products of their environment, knowing only what they were taught,

Sounds like another veiled stab at the education system. Do you think the people would have been better off if schools were abolished? That never made sense to me.

Actually, prior to mandatory public schooling, America was held in awe by the rest of the world because it had one of the most educated populations known. I urge you to read The Underground History of American Education if you would. It will be quite a revelation.

The public schooling system was inspired by the Hindu caste system in which about 1-2% could rule the rest with no fear of revolts, and the system used by Prussia that regimented their society and gained them power. This was done by old-money families and other monied interests who had a dreadful fear of American entrepreneurial ethic in which over 90% of people owned their own business and had their own independent livelihood. That doesn't jive with factory production and corporate systems at all. The founders of public education were quite open about this in the late 1800s when they gained ground. They didn't hide it; they were proud of their reasons and motivations.

The Underground History of Education

Commence the apologist "debunking" of this book slash "just a dumb Anonymous Coward trolling" in 5, 4, 3...

I don't usually mod up ACs, but this is informative and well presented.

We've wrestled with this Google Apps for Education issue as well for a small non-profit I am a trustee of. Is it worth it for the privacy issues? Of course, if the NSA spies on everyone, maybe that is a moot point?

See also John Taylor Gatto on why the system is so hard to change. From:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
------
Power à 22

PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME

FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies

1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters

2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility

3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts

4) The courts

5) Big-city departments of education

6) State departments of education

7) Federal Department of Education

8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)

SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests

1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.

2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.

3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.

4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.

5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.

6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.

7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.

THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry

1) Colleges and universities

2) Teacher training colleges

3) Researchers

4) Testing organizations

5) Materials producers (other than print)

6) Text publishers

7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers

Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.

There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chartâ"unless a culprit runs afoul of the mediaâ"an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals arenâ(TM)t distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving

So true. Or as Albert Einstein said:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind."

John Taylor Gatto talks about the core purpose of education in his writings, which include self-development, becoming a good citizen, and preparation for work. Unfortunately, so much focus now in schools is on preparation for work, and it is overall preparation for work like rote factory work that is less and less in existence. But, adding some humanities courses when someone is 18-21 can't repair all the damage of a missing part of K-12.
http://www.awakenedamerican.com/content/john-taylor-gatto-explains-secrets-elite-boarding-school-education

And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinate

> How do you feel about people getting paid for playing other games?

Largely a waste of money.

Society would rather be entertained for a few few minutes/hours rather then give a shit about investing in the future of its country (children) by supporting the most important people in any society: Teachers and fix a broken indoctrination system.

i.e.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

--
Only Cowards use Censorship

And... yeah, I think you know all the possible explanations for why the school system is broken already, so I won't bother rehashing old threads.

I assure you that I don't. The Underground History of American Education is well worth a read. Or at least listen to what he has to say.

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?" - http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

I think we can put some blame on the school system too

Just to show you that the concept of corporate interests in American education are nothing new, or even out of the ordinary, or even not an inherent part of the system itself: The Underground History of American Education

And that is why schools-as-we-know-them are rapidly becoming obsolete, if they every made any sense at all. See my essay:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

And for general background:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/growingwithoutsc.html
http://www.ecovaproject.org/education.htm
http://archives.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsletterid=21&articleid=195
http://www.patfarenga.com/

I could go on for dozens or even hundreds more links...

As Gatto wrote about the big problem with this "system" we call "public schooling" (contrast with "public libraries") is that:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

And that is why schools-as-we-know-them are rapidly becoming obsolete, if they every made any sense at all. See my essay:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

And for general background:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/growingwithoutsc.html
http://www.ecovaproject.org/education.htm
http://archives.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsletterid=21&articleid=195
http://www.patfarenga.com/

I could go on for dozens or even hundreds more links...

As Gatto wrote about the big problem with this "system" we call "public schooling" (contrast with "public libraries") is that:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education", IN FULL, online

* "education* was paid-for by the coal-industry, to eradicate autonomy from all "worker" population ( no more back-talk or independent thinking )

* it was modeled on the LOWER-caste Hindu education

etc...

( Benjamin Franklin was mostly self-taught, as was Lincoln...
and I've read the writings of historical slaves who were more learned than the modern "average" nowadays )

Wikipedia's copy of his Main thesis

What does the school do with the children? Gatto states the following assertions in "Dumbing Us Down":

• It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
• It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
• It makes them indifferent.
• It makes them emotionally dependent.
• It makes them intellectually dependent.
• It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
• It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.

---

Think about it:
any child who's ALLOWED to think autonomously...
is a threat to School's Authority(tm)...
and, once out of school, the "Authority" is different, but the principle's the same...

We geeks have it good:
science is a method, and it is objective
( appeal to authority is broken by Universe being itself, & testable )
but outside of our culture, anyone who holds to
Truth Is Testable, and ANYONE can discover what is more-true...

gets beaten on, broken, and maybe accused of being a "terrorist" too,
like that convicted felon "Jesus" you may have heard of...

Bullying leverages itself against all it feels to be threat, automatically,
and making certain that rural "education" leaves its product, many real lives as incapable of autonomy, functional planning, or even effective thinking, as possible is something I've seen too damn much of...

Any population dumbed-down enough is prevented from self-determination, or, in other words,
any population dumbed-down enough is subjugated to "authority" managing their resources & lives, helplessly.

Damage done through abuse or neglect doesn't get undone quickly or without great work/cost.

In the McCain/Obama election this was shown again:
many latinas live in a culture that disallows their personhood/validity much as the women of the suffragette era did to white women,
and they were committed to bloc voting for McCain/Palin...

Why? because in the animal-logic of the beaten,
simply having someone of one's kind appear in the "authority"-category feels animal-validating...

that they were committed to giving incorporated money greater rights & removing influence & wasteful/costly social-support from poor latinas, their entire category of people, was incognizable to all in their induced-condition...

Machiavelli was a pro, for his time...

what the standard is, nowadays,
would sicken him...

( hint: read "Women's Ways of Knowing", which identifies 4 modes of human-meaning, 1 of which is what our culture calls "battered women syndrome"...
and consider the places in the world where ENTIRE POPULATIONS are in that mode, where peace cannot be won unless it is imposed until the mind-damaged population is replaced with a syst

There is some truth to what you say, unquestionably. Still, what I am saying reflects actual US policy and the behavior of most US Americans, whatever adages remain around from older generations... Most people in the USA may have heard "you are what you eat", yet most people still eat a lot of empty calories from refined starches and sugars and cruelly-raised nutrient-poor meat. That disconnect seems symptomatic of a bubble to me. And it is reflected in US corporate-shaped policy:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

There is a history there of decades of efforts by the meat and dairy industry to push the "four food groups" to the detriment of most US Americans, a legacy that still continues even with the USDA food pyramid and later efforts. Better pyramids:
http://www.cellinteractive.com/ucla/center_overview/pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/

Why doesn't every US American know about "the pleasure trap" as an aspect of "you are what you eat"?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

If a lot of people in the country accept such behaviors (similar to accepting pictures of the "Great Leader" everywhere in North Korea and various paranoid and repressive NK policies), then what difference is there? No doubt a lot of North Koreans talk about how free and well-off they are... A lot of TFA is about how North Koreans probably don't know what is really going on... And those who do feel they have little power to act. How is that very different from, say, how people working at Walmart, the USA's biggest private employer, do not unionize because people there fear for their jobs if they do and have been taught that collective social action is bad etc. etc. (or at least not taught that it is good and had most independent initiative schooled out of them)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_union_opposition

Working inside a corporation is how many adults in the US spend most of their waking hours.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as F

From the article: "Ordinary North Koreans [US Citizens?] live in a near-total information bubble, without any true frame of reference. I can't think of any reaction to that except absolute sympathy. My understanding is that North Koreans [US Americans?] are taught to believe they are lucky to be in North Korea [the USA?], so why would they ever want to leave? They're hostages in their own country, without any real consciousness of it. And the opacity of the country's inner workings--down to the basics of its economy--further serves to reinforce the state's control. The best description we could come up with: it's like The Truman Show, at country scale. "

How true is that for the USA? I still hear people talking about how the USA has the best health care in the world, the healthiest population, the most upward mobility for its population, the best food supply, the highest level of democracy, the lowest taxes, the best education system, the most productive workers, and so on... And many US Americans still believe that creating artificial scarcity through copyrights, patents, and perpetual warfare is the path to abundance, and that draconian drug laws and draconian computer crime laws are the path to security... And many US Americans think there is little relation between what they eat and how they feel... Most US Americans have been taught to be afraid of sunlight when outdoor workers get less melanomas than indoor office workers... Many US Americans think we should reduce the US government debt when that is (unfortunatley) what creates the US money supply... Etc... Etc...

Contrast with what John Taylor Gatto says about schooling:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates -- these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put

Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/

And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools

The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8

See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism

The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.

There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).

Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html

See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im

From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
====
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
    An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
    And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars -- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
    It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. ...
====

More on the kid and what he was found with:

http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi
""He really cares about people," she said. "He's kind, he's loving, he's brilliant...I think this is fear because of what just happened in Connecticut." The mother of the high school junior asked us not to identify her or her son. He may be sitting in a juvenile detention center, but she says he's a fine young man who volunteers to help senior citizens and was once a Boy Scout. She says his passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things lead to this arrest. .. "

http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?2,1482541,1482565
"The evening news reported that what was taken from the home included cleaning fluids and flour, steel wool and a cell phone."

"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."

For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options. ..."

People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?

Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.

Better information on how kids learn:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0fg73WnLWQ
http://www.holtgws.com/howchildrenlearn.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI

And also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8RulhBVzbk

So, if there is an answer to your question, it is because the school kid was already in a form of prison, and then he broke the written or unwritten prison rules, and he is now being further punished. What was the original crime that landed him in a day-prison called "school" though? Just being young? For alternatives, see: http://www.educationrevolution.org/

As New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto wrote:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
    Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. ...

That said, I liked your insightful and ironic point. As another poster replied, you made probably the best comment here.

"I know this because I emailed him looking for a citation once, and his assistant returned my email and told me"

Citation please? :-) Or are anecdotes, like in Gattos' story, permissible as evidence in discussion?

Yes, in one of Gatto's books he says he wants readers to research this for themselves. See:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue8.htm
"Despite its title, Underground History isn't a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it's a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty-five to thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn't one of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people in conversation. I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own experience to bear on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal before you and I promise your money's worth. It isn't important whether we agree on every detail.
    A brief word on sources. I've identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I've avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to those who do not."

Gatto may play fast and loose with some things, but overall he paints a coherent big picture and the core points of his arguments are easily found through some web searches. Here are two examples both with a bunch of citations on similar themes to what Gatto says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
http://www.social-ecology.org/2003/10/the-emergence-of-compulsory-schooling-and-anarchist-resistance/

I collected lots of links to a variety of authors who say similar things here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Or see:
http://studentliberation.com/main-anti-school-literature.html

What Gatto does have is a free online book that goes into depth into this based on his award-winning thirty years of experience teaching in the NYC public school system. Disagree with him and his perspspective and analysis perhaps, but at least he writes from a tremendous amount of first-hand experience.

Alternatives: http://www.educationrevolution.org/

From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education: 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 unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about yo

> Schools are at least as much about social engineering as they are about indoctrination

FTFY. Specifically, numerous people have pointed out the problems of a public indoctrination system:

* The Underground History of American Education
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can't sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue."

" 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."

* A Mathematician's Lament
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

* Here's what schools don't teach kids:
1. Anything about money.
2. How businesses work, so that they enter the game with no knowledge of how it's played.
3. Basic psychology, so that even if they understand the game, they can be effectively gamed. Obviously, psychology would be very useful in raising kids.
4. Parenting, other than what they learned by living (courtesy of parents, teachers, ministers, coaches, police ..) so they repeat all prior mistakes.
5. Collaboration and team effort.

Here's what they learn.
1. There is only one right answer to each question.
2. Your success is entirely based on your grades and obedience/attendance.
3. There are no new ideas. Everything you know is in books, according to a curriculum approved by committee.
4. Creativity, taking your time and questioning authority and status quo are punishable offenses.
5. Sharing information with others is punishable by expulsion.
6. Ethics are OK to talk about, but in real life, everything's fair; just don't get caught.

You can see the result. Roughly 10% of people are "successful" and innovation comes from roughly 1%. 90% of work is meant to make the boss happy, and 10% towards customers, teamwork is unheard of and requires expensive consultants to achieve at a minimal level, and you're paid almost entirely for your paper certificates and longevity.

Reference:
From the book "Children Learn What They Live" by Dorothy Law Nolte.

"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "

There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.

I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/

Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m

"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "

There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.

I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/

Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m

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

Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also:
"In Defense Of Childhood: Protecting Kids'' Inner Wildness"
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."

Public schools as we know them are going the way of the Dodo bird. Khan Academy is just one example of "learning on demand" as a larger trend I wrote about five years ago:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Pushes like these are just one last gasp of a dying system. Jerry Mintz talks about that here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/sustainable-education/

If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

So, rather than address issues of society making good parenting difficult, it sounds like this "ethicist" would just terminate in advance all the children at risk of "potential alcoholism" who just need good parenting and good societies to blossom in -- places with walking trails (see "Blue Zones"), with people getting vitamin-D from sunlight, lots of cheap vegetables and healthy fats like omegas-3s, with toxins like many artifical colors and flavors excluded from the food supply, and so on... As Dr. Fuhrman says in "Eat to Live", genes may give us weak links, but how much those links are pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle (and upbringing).

Note also that nature is often more concerned about parasite resistance and disease resistance than many other factors this ethicist might focus on instead -- so that ethicist's plan put in practice might produce a society of great-looking high-IQ people who collapse at the first sniffle. Just look at what industrial breeding of tomatoes has brought us as far as what you see in your typical supermarket (compared to heirloom varieties).

It's sad what passes for overly-cerebral "ethics" these days (as much as I too might have said much the same when I was younger, brought up in a hyper-competitive US culture); here is part of why that is (but a bunch more is just a cultural pendulum swinging perhaps):
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/11b.htm
"The eugenics movement begun by Galton in England was energetically spread to the United States by his followers. Besides destroying lesser breeds (as they were routinely called) by abortion, sterilization, adoption, celibacy, two-job family separations, low-wage rates to dull the zest for life, and, above all, schooling to dull the mind and debase the character, other methods were clinically discussed in journals, including a childlessness which could be induced through easy access to pornography.2 At the same time those deemed inferior were to be turned into eunuchs, Galtonians advocated the notion of breeding a super race. Humanist Scott Nearing wrote his masterpiece, The Super Race: An American Problem, in 1912, just as the drive to destroy an academic curriculum in public schools was reaching its first crescendo. By "problem," Nearing wasn't referring to a moral dilemma. Rather, he was simply arguing that only America had the resources to meet the engineering challenge posed in creating supermen out of genetic raw stock."

Gatto suggests even the reason school rooms were called "class rooms" is linked with the eugenics notion that "classes" of people kept together would end up breeding with the same class, to produce superior offspring for the high ranked classes, and easily exploitable and disposable ones for the lower ranked ones.

As you say, today's defect can be tomorrow's salvation. There seems to be plenty of room for more people with more unique ideas and perspectives as part of a global (or someday galaxy-wide) cooperative discussion:

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

However, schooling is certainly effective in keeping young people out of the work force. What most of the comments here seem to ignore is that 200 years ago, children at age 4 or 5 were working on farms and in mines and in factories. Now, with automation and electric motors, children are out of the work force generally until they turn 21 (or longer if they go to grad school). Things have changed so much, and many people posting here seem unaware of that. At this point, most work is "make work" related to guarding or pointless zero-sum competition.

I agree with your point about decision makers being out-of-touch with emerging technological realities. See my site for more on that.

And see also:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
http://anwot.org/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."

See also:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest

Those links explain in part how can such "smart" people totally ignore the potential for "blowback" from the violent actions they endorse (actions which include the slaughter of endless innocents, the violation of national sovereignty and probably international law, the setting of an example of ironic misuse of advanced technology that could otherwise bring material abundance to the entire world, and so on)... These links help show why these academics are willfully blind to the idea that they are endorsing polices that may be creating 100 new terrorist for every one they think they might have killed.

Never forget what one of our greatest Marine Major Generals said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare."

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were *supposed* to be expensive quagmires so somebody's buddies coudl get lucrative "defense" contracts. These conflicts were *supposed* to drive up oil prices so somebody's buddies would see the value of their domestic oil holdings increase. And so on...

See also:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/killer-drone-attacks-ille_b_1623065.html
"Christof Heyns, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, expressed grave concern about the targeted killings, saying they may constitute war crimes. He called on the Obama administration to explain how its drone strikes comport with international law, specify the bases for decisions to kill rather than capture particular individuals, and whether the State in which the killing takes place has given consent. Heyns further asked for specification of the procedural safeguards in place, if any, to ensure in advance of drone killings that they comply with international law. He also wanted to know what measures the U.S. government takes after any such killing to ensure that its legal and factual analysis was accurate and, if not, the remedial measures it would take, including justice and reparations for victims and their families. Although Heyns' predecessor made similar requests, Heyns said the United States has not provided a satisfactory response.
Heyns also called on the U.S. government to make public the number of civilians collaterally killed as a result of drone attacks, and the measures in place to prevent such casualties. Once again, Heyns said the United States has not satisfactor

before WW2 most people could barely read or not read at all and the only job they could get was working on a farm. serving in the military and getting some war booty was more exciting. back in those days graduating high school was a major achievement.

now in the first world the vast majority of people know how to read, have a high school education and a lot have higher education degrees. why would these people want to join the army, crawl through the mud and be shot at or blown up? for minimum wage salary?

this chart indicates literacy hasn't changed that much in the 1900s, and this article suggests it's gotten worse among military applicants. The statistics are based on people who were not allowed to enlist due to lack of basic reading skills. You need to read a lot of notices, manuals, written orders, etc in the military. Believe it or not, some people (I believe most) join because they want to *serve*, not because it's the best they can do financially.

I am not a veteran, but I know many and I respect them and it bothers me when they are characterized as being stupid or greedy, when in my experience they are intelligent and generous.