Bump for I need to read this later
Bkmk
Like others above, I need to bookmark this FASCINATING, albeit lengthy piece. I will be back!
Number for later
WOW! I mean, WOWWW!!!
Bookmarked.
STOP!
Everyone should read this, it is a very good article and explains a lot, I hated School and began a quest to actually Learn as much as possible after I got out of school.
I found these to snippets to be the most telling of our education system:
“Nazism could be understood only as the psychological product of good schooling.”
“The sheer weight of received ideas, pre-thought thoughts, was so overwhelming that individuals gave up trying to assess things for themselves. Why struggle to invent a map of the world or of the human conscience when schools and media offer thousands of ready-made maps, pre-thought thoughts? “
THIS should be required reading for all students.
To the rest of you, *PING*.
MUST READ.
I need to add that Gatto did not predict/foresee what was happening to libraries. His praise of libraries back then is not as valid today.
This older article, is in my opinion, Classical FreeRepublic on display. It is a must read, rather than the “mandatory” or mandated read. I know of at least two people with much the same perception of the Public education system today some forty years on from the original printed here for our benefit. The two would be Alex Newman, and Dr Duke Pesta.
Sorry for the link that exceeds page parameters. Not sure if it is at all possible to fix that. I’m not at present capable of the fix it there is one.
= For just about the same money you can walk down the street in Bath to the Apprentice Shop at the Maine Maritime Museum and sign on for a one-year course (no vacations, forty hours a week) in traditional wooden boat building. The whole tuition is eight hundred dollars, but there’s a catch: they won’t accept you as a student until you volunteer for two weeks, so they can get to know you and you can judge what it is you’re getting into. Now you’ve invested thirteen months and fifteen hundred dollars and you have a house and a boat. What else would you like to know? How to grow food, make clothes, repair a car, build furniture, sing?
Those of you with a historical imagination will recognize Thomas Jefferson’s prayer for schooling — that it would teach useful knowledge. Some places do: the best schooling in the United States today is coming out of museums, libraries, and private institutes. If anyone wants to school your kids, hold them to the standard of the Shelter Institute and you’ll do fine.
...
In 1926, Bertrand Russell said casually that the United States was the first nation in human history to deliberately deny its children the tools of critical thinking; actually Prussia was first, we were second. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do that. They let readers actively participate with their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the intellect under the guise of helping it, just as standardized tests do. Well-schooled people, like schoolbooks, are very much alike. Propagandists have known for a century that school-educated people are easier to lead than ignorant people — as Dietrich Bonhoeffer confirmed in his studies of Nazism.
It’s very useful for some people that our form of schooling tells children what to think about, how to think about it, and when to think about it. It’s very useful to some groups that children are trained to be dependent on experts, to react to titles instead of judging the real men and women who hide behind the titles.
With all the money we throw away on bad education for our children... think how wonderful it COULD be...
= For just about the same money you can walk down the street in Bath to the Apprentice Shop at the Maine Maritime Museum and sign on for a one-year course (no vacations, forty hours a week) in traditional wooden boat building. The whole tuition is eight hundred dollars, but there’s a catch: they won’t accept you as a student until you volunteer for two weeks, so they can get to know you and you can judge what it is you’re getting into. Now you’ve invested thirteen months and fifteen hundred dollars and you have a house and a boat. What else would you like to know? How to grow food, make clothes, repair a car, build furniture, sing?
Those of you with a historical imagination will recognize Thomas Jefferson’s prayer for schooling — that it would teach useful knowledge. Some places do: the best schooling in the United States today is coming out of museums, libraries, and private institutes. If anyone wants to school your kids, hold them to the standard of the Shelter Institute and you’ll do fine.
...
In 1926, Bertrand Russell said casually that the United States was the first nation in human history to deliberately deny its children the tools of critical thinking; actually Prussia was first, we were second. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do that. They let readers actively participate with their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the intellect under the guise of helping it, just as standardized tests do. Well-schooled people, like schoolbooks, are very much alike. Propagandists have known for a century that school-educated people are easier to lead than ignorant people — as Dietrich Bonhoeffer confirmed in his studies of Nazism.
It’s very useful for some people that our form of schooling tells children what to think about, how to think about it, and when to think about it. It’s very useful to some groups that children are trained to be dependent on experts, to react to titles instead of judging the real men and women who hide behind the titles.
With all the money we throw away on bad education for our children... think how wonderful it COULD be...