You know, no matter how much research into public schooling that I do, I keep finding ever more shocking data. To think that when I was in school in the 50's and 60's this plot for the minds of the masses had already begun is frightening. It is even more frightening in light of the new president's current grab for power. It is the biggest transfer of power in the history of our country. It is the biggest expenditure of our tax dollars in the combined history of all of our presidents. All this is going on while we stand idly by with our mouths open in disbelief - but saying nothing to stop the wreckless spending. More money for our failing education system, he says, while he sends his kids to a private school.
I have included a quote from a new book by John Gatto called Weapons of Mass Instruction. Although he is a faint voice crying futily in the wilderness his words confirm stacks of other research I have done on our public schooling over the last ten years. "We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform.........But mass production required required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era - marketing."
"Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain one's self; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on television. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another...."
"Schools train children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music art, economics, theology - all the stuff school teachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone; they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can."
First, though,wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day."
Quite a mouthful, but according to every document that I have combed, all the way up to and through the federal Department of Education and their secret societies, every word is TRUE! It would be worth the time and money for every parent to purchase a copy of this new work by Mr. Gatto. Excellent insight.
