Forced Government Indoctrination Camps (part 4)

Every day all over the world, millions of bright young minds are spending the best years of their lives being herded around by governments like cattle, responding to bells, whistles and other Pavlovian/Skinnerian conditioning. Millions of children are locked into this program Monday to Friday from 9-5 performing boring/arduous tasks against their will because society has deemed it necessary. Just like the workplace, only unquestioning compliance is rewarded and your only reprieves are snack breaks and lunch time, which are withheld from you like salivating dogs until the bell rings. Meanwhile you anxiously sit in rigid rows all facing the big boss and the blackboard, focused on fantasy objectives, conditioned to view other students as competitors and hindrances.

“By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically … Love of learning can’t survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools alienate the winners as well as the losers … By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America. Half a century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United States … Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted … [school] teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (245-6)

“It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens. Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.” -Marvin Minsky

“There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.” –William Damon, Stanford University Center on Adolescence

“Don’t let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and preachy music suffocate your little boy or girl’s consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (298-9)

Does all this age-graded, childish “edutainment,” serve to make education more fun, or more trivial and superficial? As cute as they may be, are Disney, Barney, Sesame Street and others what are best for our children? Are textbooks with bright color pictures helpful or distracting?

“Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.” –Thomas Hodgskin, 1823

“Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality - and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.” -Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children," 1862

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.” –George Bernard Shaw

“Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his infinite delight’ with Spenser’s Faerie Queen—an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its ‘Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses.’ Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. ‘Frank had a dog. His name was Spot.’ That happened …There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do - forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (252)

George Washington attended only 2 years of formal schooling in his life. Abraham Lincoln had only 50 weeks of schooling and even that was seen as a waste of time by his relatives. In 1840 the rate of complex literacy in the US was incredibly high, between 93 and 100 percent. The Connecticut census showed only 1 of every 579 people was illiterate. Over a century and a half later in 1993, the National Adult Literacy Survey reported that 1 in every 5 Americans was illiterate! The 1993 survey represented 190 million US adults over age 16 with an average school attendance of 12.4 years. 42 million were completely illiterate, 50 million read at a 4^th – 5^th grade level, 55-60 million read at a 6^th – 8^th grade level, 30 million at a 9^th – 10^th grade level, and less than 10 million at a University level.

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.” –Sir Walter Scott

“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?’” -John Taylor Gatto, “The History of American Education”

Dr. Seuss, the children’s author, wrote many best-sellers admittedly using a controlled "scientific" vocabulary supplied by his publisher. He said in a 1981 interview that, “I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, ‘ I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book.’ I found ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat.”

“Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.” –Richard Mitchell, "The Underground Grammarian"

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