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1. 1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2. 2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3. 3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4. 4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5. 5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6. 6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

Your assertions are unsupported, and at odds with Mr. Gatto who has supported his views at length in his book: "The Underground History of American Education" (full text, site may be down). Your points also do not address his points in his essay "Nine Assumptions of Schooling (and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss)"

When you have spent decades teaching in a public school, won a statewide "best teacher of the year" award, and written a book on the history of education which required years of research, (or just support your points with better evidence) then perhaps your opinions might be given equal weight to those of Mr. Gatto on this subject. As it is, you are just some guy on the internet flinging accusations of crackpottery at a better man with a better argument and better evidence.

To get back to the topic at hand, here is a section from Gatto's article: "Confederacy of Dunces the Tyranny of Compulsory Schooling"

Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.

Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.

The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far.

The great theological scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised this issue of the new dumbness in his brilliant analysis of Nazism, in which he sought to comprehend how the best-schooled nation in the world, Germany, could fall unde

Your assertions are unsupported, and at odds with Mr. Gatto who has supported his views at length in his book: "The Underground History of American Education" (full text, site may be down). Your points also do not address his points in his essay "Nine Assumptions of Schooling (and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss)"

When you have spent decades teaching in a public school, won a statewide "best teacher of the year" award, and written a book on the history of education which required years of research, (or just support your points with better evidence) then perhaps your opinions might be given equal weight to those of Mr. Gatto on this subject. As it is, you are just some guy on the internet flinging accusations of crackpottery at a better man with a better argument and better evidence.

To get back to the topic at hand, here is a section from Gatto's article: "Confederacy of Dunces the Tyranny of Compulsory Schooling"

Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.

Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.

The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far.

The great theological scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised this issue of the new dumbness in his brilliant analysis of Nazism, in which he sought to comprehend how the best-schooled nation in the world, Germany, could fall unde

We're doing our best to keep them as uneducated as possible, by failing to properly support the school

The school system is functioning as intended. The Prussian model ours is based on is designed to create dumbed down workers that are incapable of critical thinking.

Compulsory Government Education: Origins and Solutions

"How public education cripples our kids, and why" by John Taylor Gatto

The School Sucks Project is an excellent podcast and blog on government schools.

If not... We Need Less School, Not More

The last thing we need for our drugged up kids is more time in government indoctrination centers. As John Taylor Gatto puts it, We Need Less School, Not More. Also watch State Controlled Consciousness by John Taylor Gatto.

"Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated." http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm

I suppose you don't believe in the "housing bubble" either.

and because we're exporting all the mindless jobs (read: assembly lines, manufacturing) to the countries whose technology levels have risen high enough to accept them.

"Mindless jobs" are an artifact of the "industrial devolution". No economy that depends on dumbing down the majority of the population is sustainable.

If you check the numbers, I'm sure you'll notice that the negative trade balance with the country we've exported many of our "mindless jobs" to is now at a record level. Seems that the Chinese people don't need much in the way of mindful services provided by Americans. I think this is indicative of a problem. Do you?

That argument may work in public high schools, it probably works in trade schools, but it does not work in Universities. Universities are trying to give a deep, not a vocational, education. It is debatable what high schools are trying to do. Tech trade schools might hurt their students by using non-standard tools, assusming the students aren't given enough tools/abilities to learn new software quickly.

I TA a computer lab at the university I am at. When people come in and want to learn about the tools they are going to use, I don't refer them directly to Final Cut. Any idiot can learn final cut on their own by playing around, or reading a book. The same goes for about any other program. Learn the basics - framerates, compression formats, broadcast formats, and whatnot - don't learn how to point an click. Because when the next great thing comes along, anyone who knows just programs is screwed, anyone who knows what the program is doing behind the scenese will be just fine. The general skillls are the most important.

There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.

This is not true. In Soviet Union the arts where a matter for everyone. All works of art were for everyone. Museums, theatres, classical music, classical literature, all of that was intended for everyone, to farmers, workers, engineers, scientists, other artists. It was a matter of state interests to improve first the literacy, then education and cultural level of all people. And it worked. Of course, with the collapse of the socialism publishers decided to get some quick profits, turned to printing pulp, people became interested to check it out, they initially liked it, because it didn't require as much thinking, then publishers stopped printing classics and good modern books and people didn't have a choice, but had to read the pulp. Finally, some demand emerged again for the classics, but now the print runs are small, the prices are high and the rich tend to buy good books, while the poor read low-quality dreck.

And although the Soviet Union clearly lead in the quest for literacy and high culture for everyone, other countries tried to follow. Read The Classics in the Slums, an article about British workers in late 19th century - early 20th century. They had a huge interest in reading, art and learning and a lot of them (a majority?) were interested in classical literature (Greek tragedies, Shakespear, poetry), classical music and education. For them it was a matter of personal development and a break from the monotony of the jobs. Not everyone could easily accept that because of class prejudice - "They knew that you breathed and you slept and you worked, but they didn't know that you read. Such a thing was beyond comprehension. They thought that in your spare time you sat and gazed into space. . . . You could almost see them reporting you to their friends. "Margaret's a good cook, but unfortunately she reads. Books, you know."" It's today that people actually sit and gaze into space. It's called TV.

A UK survey of pupils (1940) in a below average group showed that 62% of boys and 84% of girls had read some poetry, their favorites including Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, 67% of girls and 31% of boys had read plays and students averaged six or seven books per month (this excludes texts required in schools).

A USA study of adults ("Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America", 2002) showed that 43% of American adults had not read any books at all (other than those required for work or school), only 12.1% had read any poetry and only 3.6% had read any plays.

Another interesting article is As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor - On the Uses of a Liberal Education, an amazing experiement in teaching humanities to poor people. 50% graduated from the course and liberal education DID help poor people to improve their lives. It not only increased students' self-esteem, but also their abilities to divine and solve problems. They enrolled in colleges, got jobs, became politically active.

Read something like Against School to get some understanding on why Western school is so bad. It is by design, the system goes back to German schools and was intended to sustain the difference between the classes. The children of the elite got classical education, while the masses got dumbed down education. It is sometimes called the "two corridors model".

This is another area, where Soviet system shined. There was only one system of education, starting with the kindergarden and ending with post-graduate studies. A worker could (and was encouraged

Your PBS history likely misses a few things about the history of American education, which has changed dramatically for the worse since the beginning of the 20th century. See John Taylor Gatto's book:
_The Underground History of American Education_
A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into The Problem Of Modern Schooling
(full text available online at: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm)

John Taylor Gatto quit teaching with a broadside on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while he was still New York State Teacher of the Year, saying that he was "no longer willing to hurt children".

Here's an appropriate Gatto quote:
"Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

' to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. '

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia."

http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm

You are not a troll, you are simply a confused person, who thinks that "powers that be" are interested in improving the education. Well, they are, but their ideas of improvement are very different from your own ones.

There is a vast amount of information on all aspects of problem with the education system available, but here are some quick links.

http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
http://www.beverlye.com/article1.html
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-c lassics.html

Read up on Educational Quality Assessment test, on two-corridor educational system, on the emergence of standardized testing, on the origins of the American public school system. It isn't that there is a conspiracy to enslave and dumb down the kids, it's that the main participants who shaped the education system are not interested in having a well-educated populace and that shows.

BTW, contrast it with the Soviet Union and other socialist/communist countries where education was perceived as a goal in itself (In 1970s an international survey on automation showed that among factory workers about twice as many had completed secondary education in the USSR as in the US. At the same time it was perceived in the Soviet Union that the workers had not enough educaiton, while in the USA it was perceived that the workers had too much education).

Schools mindlessly spending on tech is a symptom, not a problem.

I'm going to chime in here.

Just becuase you are not interested in a subject or do not like a subject does not mean you are choosing ignorance, it means you would prefer to learn something else.

Should a doctor have to take classes on accounting and business managmeent? Should an electrical engineer learn how to perform surgery? Of course not! Why should anyone have to learn anything that is not useful to what they want to do in life? An education teaches you how to make it in the real world - reading, writing, and math (to the point of usefulness for your profession). An education should also give you the grounding to be able to learn on your own. An education does not make you smart, it can only make you knowledgable. Smart people know how to pick up knowledge on their own direction.

I totally hated and despised high school and got nothing out of it. Every day was miserable for me becuase it was so intellectually devoid. I was not interested in learning 20 different unrelated and irrelevant subjects. On my own, I learned much about computers, programming, electronics, and things in between, far more than what high school could have provided (or would have let me have the time for) to me.

I've heard the same arguments from people like you. Full of reasons why you should conform to some empty societal norm of "appreciating" a liberal arts education over a self-directed education. People who "do good" in manadatory classes are considered smart while the kids who hate the whole process but are spending their spare time getting into computers, electronics, or anything else and not making good grades in school are not considered special at all becuase they do not follow the norms of society.

I also think it is sad that you think all women are the same and only appreciate men with a broad non-specialized education rather than someone who is really talented in his field and capable of critical and creative thought. This is totally wrong, I've met the nicest lady who shares many of my interests and philosophies. She doesn't care that I do not give a shit about Shakespeare but she appreciates the fact that we can have a intelligent discussion and talk about things on a more critical depth.

Guess what? Employers do not want "well rounded" individuals. Most companies who want to hire someone with specialized knowledge (say, an engineering firm who needs an electrical engineer). They want someone who is at the top of their field and can effectively do their job. Does this mean they will take the brightest guy who doesn't know how to communicate? Of course not. They want the brightest person who can work with others and collaborate effectively. These are things that people need, not a smattering of courses that will never apply to their area of work.

The stuff you learn in those required classes in high school (and even college) barely touch on the subject and touch on it in such a pitiful way. I started out being a computer geek but because of all the information and people I am surrounded by, I became interested in topics like sociology and philosophy (I am a CS and Sociology double major). I read up many texts and famous works on my own, now that I am taking some basic level classes on sociology, I am finding that the course content is very brief and lacks the same insight I was able to gain in my own self-directed instruction.

High School is indeed obsolete and this notion is hardly new. John Taylor Gatto has been saying this for years - as a former schoolteacher himself.

For those who would like a shorter essay by the same author on the same topic, he wrote an article entitled Against School in the September 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine.

You can blame everything from the Liberals to the Conservatives, the Democrats/Republicans, Neo-Nazi's/Black Panthers, TV, Music Videos, Rap Music, or anything else for the problems with the vision people have of America.
You can blame Capitalists, Socialists, Communists, optimists, pessimists, fatalists, atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Transcendentalists, Bhuddists, Taoists, Shintoists, etc... And you can bet someone else will be pointing their finger at you. But if you want to know a real reason America is a land of consumers with little reason to care about anything but what they can buy today, read this essay written by John Taylor Gatto, NY State Teacher of the Year in 1991.