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From: BOBWORN@aol.com
Subject: SNET: AMERIKA - A Disaster Of Ignorance
Date: 3 Mar 2000 11:23:02 -0500
To: BOBWORN@aol.com


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http://www.ftrbooks.com/psych/education/gatto_01.htm

An excerpt from the book:

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of
Compulsory Schooling
by John Taylor Gatto


Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling
movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million
young people are being educated entirely by their own parents;
last month the education press reported the amazing news that
children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years
ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

I don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in
my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a
disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution
"schools" very well, though it does not "educate;" that's inherent in
the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little
money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to
be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper
of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers
College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific
management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce,
through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose
behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national
order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which the only
"successful" people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and
individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent
and the weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling
are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can
sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit
mindlessly
before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless.
Useless to others and useless to themselves.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact
that,
as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago, we force children to grow up absurd.
Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.


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