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In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the
University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a
counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future.
In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations
"not by their own individual accomplishments. In such a world people
who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become
privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what
they don’t know by themselves, without consulting experts. -- Kurt
Johmann, quoting John Taylor Gatto
The question on the minds of many people with
consciences who are so aghast at the sudden savagery of the new
terror-based policies of the U.S. government is how has
the American public so silently and willingly acquiesced to the
dishonest and murderous attitudes of George W. Bush and his criminal oil
cartel.
The hypnotic power of television is of course
one main component of the fearful powerlessness that now grips the
American populace and has the rest of the world cringing in fear about
where the power elite's military monster will strike next. That is a
subject for another time.
The real credit for this continuing American
coma belongs to something that has been right in front of our eyes all
the time. It's something we have supported, spent our money on, and
prayed for, something we have participated in ourselves.
The reason Bush has been able to get away with
lie after lie in his drive to obliterate our Constitution and install
himself as dictator of the world is our public school system. What they
did to all of us is directly related to what is happening now in the
world.
This connection becomes perfectly obvious when
you read Kurt Johmann's essay, "Unschooling: Self-directed learning
is best," on his website ( http://www.johmann.net/ )
Johmann, a software developer who lives in
Florida, quotes John Taylor Gatto, an award-winning teacher who taught in
New York City government schools for 26 years and quit teaching in 1991
"so he wouldn't harm any more children." Gatto, author of
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory
Schooling," and other books investigating the fallacies of public
education, insists American public schools teach a hidden curriculum of seven
lessons:
1. Confusion. Gatto notes several things
contributing to what he calls the lesson of confusion, including: a lack
of subject-related context for what is taught; too many unrelated facts
and unrelated subjects; a lack of meaning and critical thinking about what
is taught.
About this lack of critical thinking Gatto says:
"Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a
school or a teacher could be criticized, since everything must be
accepted."
With this kind of training, how would it be possible
for a kid to know what valuable things are NOT in public school
curricula? And by extension, how would it be possible for that same adult
to discern that what her leaders tell her about American history bears
little resemblance to what happened to the victims of those who wrote the
histories?
2. Class position. Gatto points to the way
students are kept in the same class by age, and, within this age
classification, further classified and separated depending on how the
students have done schoolwise (for example, classification into so-called
gifted classes).
About this lesson Gatto says: "That's the
real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your
place."
As someone who has suffered from this myself, you have to ask how many learning
opportunities are lost because children are not properly identified using
rigidly mechanistic criteria.
3. Indifference. For this lesson Gatto is
referring to the effects of the ringing bell that announces the end of
the current class and the need of the student to drop whatever she is
doing and proceed to the next class where a different teacher and subject
await her.
About bells Gatto says:
"Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so
why care too deeply about anything?"
And as far as
educational evolution goes in kids, this rigidity causes children to
assign equal value to all classes, say math and gym, without regard to
their relative importance.
4. Emotional
dependency. This lesson results from students having to  submit to the designated authority, the teacher,
regarding their personal desires during class time. As Gatto says:
"By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and
disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain
of command."
By the time this
learned tendency reaches adulthood, it prevents many people from
realizing there may be more qualified candidates other than the two
corporate-approved rivals for any given office.
The Nazis used their schools to pile level upon level
of propaganda to turn their students into cannon fodder. We’re doing
the same thing.
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5. Intellectual
dependency. This lesson is similar to the lesson of emotional dependency,
since both lessons teach students submission to the designated authority.
In the case of the lesson of intellectual dependency, the students
specifically learn submission to establishment authorities, including the
teacher, on intellectual matters.
This definitely discourages thinking
"outside the box" when alternatives are presented to any given
problem.
As Gatto says: "Successful children do the
thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of
enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what
few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers.
Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to
know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves
about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow
that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately [Gatto is being ironic]
there are tested procedures to break the will of those who resist "
6. Provisional self-esteem. As Gatto says:
"The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children
should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on
the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they
are worth."
As a result, when people get older, they may not
be able to determine the worth of a given activity without someone whose
authority they covet approving their decision. Put more simply, they may
not be able to think for themselves.
7. One cannot hide. By this lesson Gatto means
the effect that constant surveillance has on students as they are watched
by teachers and other school employees. About the underlying reason for
this surveillance Gatto says: "children must be closely watched if
you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will
follow a private drummer if you can,t get them
into a uniformed marching band."
How many passions have been lost to students who
were told their natural aptitudes were leading them in the
"wrong" direction, and whose talents were blunted by the
corporate-approved drive toward regimented conformity?
Besides teaching this hidden curriculum, Gatto
asserts, the schools also separate children from their families, thereby
weakening the bonds of family. This attack against the family is a part
of the larger campaign in America to atomize people into individuals, so
that having only themselves, they are weak and helpless and unable to
resist the establishment, Johmann notes.
Having read this laundry list of what public
schools do to our children, isn't it clear that our government is
behaving in the same way as our monolithic school system, and isn't it
even clearer that this process is not producing thoughtful human beings?
Instead, the vast majority are the flag-waving zombies who cheer as
American military might murders innocent children in faraway places, and
turns its own citizens into robotic, thoughtless advocates of "the
war on terror"?
If you have kids in school, be sure and study Johmann's website
and its links before you make the decision to get them out of public
schools as fast as you possibly can.
John Kaminski is a
writer who lives on the coast of Florida whose education really didn't
begin until he got out of school.
Comment
By Alfred Lehmberg
Lehmberg@snowhill.com
12-27-2
A pragmatic person and a retired soldier, I can, of course, see
the need for *some* direction and oversight in culture and society. It is
the product of *some* point to reality, rationality, and realism that
humanity (select portions of it, anyway) stands on the landing of a 21st
Century medical and technical wonderland, as much as it does! But
"Direction" and "Point", as practiced by elitist,
sociopathic, and corrupted leaderships, institutions and agencies are
just additional concepts to be abused and misused -- like "national
security", "social security", or "homeland
security"!
I'm a FAILED second-career public school teacher whose REAL
education began, also, towards the end of a formal one, forgetting that
it was the *formal* one which allowed me the opportunity for access to
that larger, more satisfying, and more accurate *informal* one. And
there's the rub.
An American public education system in plainly more interested in
producing good, docile, and God fearing *employees* than it is in
producing creatively intelligent, rational, critically thinking human
beings, students and teachers. I was THERE, good reader! I -know- this to
be true! Indeed it is among the unjust reasons I was summarily fired from
a public school teaching position.
When John Dewey, the FATHER of American education, condemned the
rank and file American man and woman to creative slavery in the service
of this authoritarian elite of the corporate arbitrary, he was acting
upon the strident and unabashed sociopathy of his times. This was a time
when the mighty white was more than right and the mongrel brown should
best leave town! This was a time of an appallingly applied eugenics and
enforced sterilization (even annihilation!). This was a time of an abject
lack of meaningful protection from corporate criminals selling
substandard consumables and enriching themselves
on planet destroying planned obsolescence continuing today!
We begin to see the error of these shortsighted ways?
Another dean of American education, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi,
observed that the poor must be TRAINED to their poverty. The poor (anyone
outside a privileged elite) are very broadly
defined. Additionally, the reader can readily reason that if the poor can
be so trained to accept their lot in cruel life the RICH can be trained
in a similar, but opposing, manner. The general reader can bet that THOSE
kids are being trained to be the leaders in this twenty-first century
even as -their- children are -not-. No -- their kids are being trained in
a manner clearly described by John Taylor Gatto (a minor god in -my-
personal pantheon) to be the artless SHEEPLE so written about --
expendable motes as dry as the chalk dust in their pitiable classrooms.
I was not REMOTELY interested in producing sheeple-aping
employees, but in each individual achieving the creative and
self-actualizing personal goals of which they were able. Somehow, I had
convinced myself that this was the overriding goal of the America I
believed in, an America that was the envy of the world, I thought -- an
America that I had served so well on its flawed battlefields. I would
move that battlefield to America's classrooms. It is no -wonder- I would
be torpedoed...
I am a very highly decorated retired military officer and combat
veteran with impeccable credentials and bulletproof references that could
-not- make it public education. Can the reader entertain, along with me,
the idea that the problem was not -all- mine?
We are better than our manipulators. We see the value in our
individuality. We resent our trained poverty, our dearth of respect from
society and culture, and the lack of aggregate humanity from our
corporate overlords... we -will- drag these hijackers of the mainstream
screaming from their ivory towers eventually, perhaps sooner rather than
later. Even a "sheeple" can only be expected to take so much.
The individual IS key, and the REAL power behind
anything else, after all.
Comment
From Mary Linton
ekaiser@tds.net
12-30-2
Bah, Humbug!!!! I am a successful teacher (TOTY, STAR Teacher for
three years, featured in PAGE Magazine, listed in every edition of Who's
Who Among America's Teachers) with 25 years teaching experience over a
period of 39 years in public schools and in a private college. I have
taught college chemistry, AP chemistry, honors chemistry, CP chemistry,
honors biology and CP biology, and my students learn. You are making the
same mistake as mainstream education.
If you assume ALL children are of high intelligence with a
consuming desire to learn, then Yes, they can be home schooled or even
self taught. However, ninety-five percent of students do not fit the
above criteria. They must be loved, pushed and prodded into learning, at
least by the time they reach high school age.
Today's society is decidedly anti-learning. There are a few very
intelligent, knowledge-seeking young people and they are our hope for
tomorrow, but most students expect their parents' standard of living to
automatically be passed on to them while they are entertained by today's
media.
Unschooling is ridiculous. Our students will literally be
unschooled and then where will we be? I assure you such thinking if put
into practice will turn civilization back 200 hundred years, when the few
educated people ruled the world. Yes, public schools are assembly-line
programs riddled with problems, but they are too disorganized to
accomplish the goals you stated. As long as there are teachers in the
classroom with high moral ideals and courage of their convictions, then
American Education is alive and well. [Bullshit!]
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