An Enclosure Movement For Children (public schools)

The Oddyseus Group ^ | John Taylor Gatto

[Clintonfatigued]

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.

The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.

[Clintonfatigued]

Please read this article in its entirety. Of all of John Taylor Gatto's writings, this ranks among his best. I've never seen an article which states the personal destruction wrought upon kids by public education.

[familyop]

Public schools are now for the purpose of keeping the neighbors' kids from competing with established businesses in the near future. Another method is to encourage immoral behaviors and wastes of time for others' kids but not for one's own. Public schools (and the divorce industry) are for the purpose of keeping working class families in their place--on the plantation.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[ModelBreaker]

Some good things in the article. Quite a bit of nonsense too.

[metmom]

Thanks for the ping. I'll read it tomorrow when I'm more coherent.

[Shimmer128]

Yeah, sure there is.

[familyop]

This might not seem (to some) to be related, at first. If so, have a second look and a second thought. Bill Gates and other top owners of Microsoft have also contributed much to efforts (Planned Parenthood, workplace feminism, inheritance tax, anti-Second-Amendment organizations,...) to break up the Joneses.

The following filed briefs in favor of "affirmative action" in the Michigan "Grutter v. Bollinger" (Michigan University) case. No one is pushing the corporations to do it. They started it, and they pay their own revenues to continue it.

3M
Abbott Laboratories
American Airlines
Ashland
Bank One
Boeing
Coca-Cola
Dow Chemical
E.I. Du Pont De Nemours
Eastman Kodak
Eli Lilly
Ernst & Young
Exelon
Fannie Mae
General Dynamics
General Mills
Intel
Johnson & Johnson
Kellogg
KPMG
Lucent Technologies
Microsoft
Mitsubishi
Nationwide Mutual Insurance
Nationwide Financial
Pfizer
PPG
Proctor & Gamble
Sara Lee
Steelcase
Texaco
TRW
United Airlines
General Motors Corporation (also an Adobe Acrobat PDF file)

[Quix]

Thanks. An abundance of good points, imho.

[bluejean gal]

Get the kids out of the publik skools now, if you love them. Give up the expensive vacations if you have to, the fancy homes. Put your kids first.

Gatto has it right. We've become a nation of imbeciles. Have you been around public schoolers lately??

[Clintonfatigued]

Many parents aren't fully aware of the options they have. They went through public education, everyone they grew up with went through it, their parents went through it. As a result, they can't imagine that education can be done in any other way.

The next time a parent you know complains about how bad the schools are, let her know that there are other choices. As a friend once told me, instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.

[demnomo]

Gatto's "Dumbing Us Down" finally convinced my husband that homeschooling was the answer to our son's education and safety. There were other reasons, but that book cemeted our decision. Critical thinking skills aren't taught in public (and most private) schools. The educators are far too busy with crowd control tactics and getting their students ready for the latest round of state mandated tests.

My son is in his second year at UCSD, studing computer science. While my son has a few issues with the way the university runs things, he is able to handle "indoctrination" tactics from some of the more far out professors better than most students his age or older.

John Taylor Gatto is an amazing author. His creative solutions must scare the elitist swine that want to control our children. Great stuff.

[Clintonfatigued]

Congratulations on you and your son on his success!

What I like most about Gatto is his refusal to be confined to managed debate and willingness to stray from the beaten path and advocate solutions based on kids being taught in the way their minds work rather than labels or political factions.

[NewRomeTacitus]

Heh heh...I attended kindergarten for two weeks before ditching it to explore the woods. The folks couldn't understand that I got everything they had to offer in ten days of finger-painting, baby talk condescension, enforced naps on mats, ridiculous concepts and enforced socialization. Hey, I was already reading encyclopedias because of so much downtime with pneumonia. I fell into line when they explained that it was the law - but I always resented grade school for wasting my valuable childhood time.

Home schooling consistently turns out better educated and more stable citizens than the sad institutions of mediocrity passing as public schools. They've become far worse since my time by replacing basic curriculum with theoretical "esteem-building", expulsion with social promotion and corporal punishment with forced medication.

And people wonder where these Eric Harris's and Dylon Kliebolds are coming from.

[GSlob]

Atrocious garbage of an article. Public school is bad NOT BECAUSE it is public, and even NOT BECAUSE, or HOW, it is organized. The root of the trouble is that like a platoon marching at the speed of its slowest soldier, the slowest and dullest pupils [unless separated into a different education stream], slow everyone else down.
Here the homeschooling enjoys one very important privilege - a class of one student, i.e. perfectly homogeneous and segregated by ability student body. From the experience of [foreign] - admittedly elitist - schools which to a significant extent carried out the same segregation by ability, one could say that it is absolutely possible to achieve stunning results in a public school setting as well, since in it is possible to apply more resources than would be available to a single homeschooling family. Once upon a time and in a different realm I visited such a school, organized by university professors for their offspring. They had to open it to outsiders as a public school - and did so, as a school for the gifted on the basis of competitive admission by IQ.
If memory serves, I saw a class of maybe 35 students, age about 12-13, with minimal IQ of 140. Without pencil or paper, just in their heads, these kids were doing visualization exercises with things like 5- dimensional hypercube in its intersection with something else equally exotic. From what I've heard, from that class by now one could find maybe a dozen professors in major European universities, and a couple teaching in the Ivy league here.
Show me any home- or private- schooling advocate who would not be proud of such results. Thus it is not the organization [schedules, classes with breaks etc], nor per se the size of the class, but the quality of the student body. And one more point: when everyone around has IQ>140, it is almost impossible to coast against too strong a background. Thus competitive motivation.

[swmobuffalo]

"Have you been around public schoolers lately??"

Yes as a matter of fact I have and was pretty impressed.

What's your story?

[Tired of Taxes]

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL PING!

This ping list is for the "other" articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. If you want on/off this list, please freepmail me. The main Homeschool Ping List by DaveLoneRanger handles the homeschool-specific articles.

[Tired of Taxes]

The root of the trouble is that like a platoon marching at the speed of its slowest soldier, the slowest and dullest pupils [unless separated into a different education stream], slow everyone else down.

Some districts do separate the better students and place them in better schools. The problem is, with a school system based on the socialist model, other students with potential do become lost, stuck behind in the worse schools, as sometimes admission into the better schools comes down to pulling strings and the luck of the draw.

Privatizing education would put it all back into the hands of the parents. Then, if private companies wanted to recruit promising young students to work for them, they could offer scholarships or run their own schools to educate them. Competition would offer so many more options.

From what I've heard, from that class by now one could find maybe a dozen professors in major European universities, and a couple teaching in the Ivy league here.

Great. They're probably the ones spouting all the Leftist ideas. ;-)

[basil]

Ping!

[cgk]

BFLR