[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.

[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)

[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??

[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.

[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.

[basil]

Ping!

[cgk]

BFLR

[JamesP81]

One of my best friends is a public school teacher. I'd get him to read this if I didn't think it would end the friendship.

[linda_22003]

And yet, just a little more education from one source or another might have resulted in a correct spelling of "Odysseus" in the headline source. :)

[linda_22003]

The article refers to kids "confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do." If that doesn't prepare them for life in the workforce, what will? :)

[JamesP81]

I tend to self-educate myself quite a bit. I've learned a hundred times, literally, as much after leaving school as I did when I was in school.

They constantly say European schools are better than American schools. Ultimately, they're probably right. However, what they don't understand any more is this: good character, good judgment, and freedom are far superior to any amount of education.

[JamesP81]

I wonder how much support I'd get if I started a school that operated in the Socratic classical way. It would never be compulsory; attendance voluntary. And the real learning would occur by students who were willing to learn and taught themselves. With modern technology that Socrates didn't have access to (the Internet and air travel, for example) I think you could provide an environment that promoted civility, civic duty, self-reliance, good character, and excellent judgment. I wonder how much resources the NEA would expend trying to stop me?

[Katya]

I don't know if you can generalize, public school education varies from state to state, and often county to county. Unlike most european nations, we do not have a homogenous population in many states and cities, so teachers are having to use curriculuum that will speak to a host of cultures. Are there issues with public schooling...of course.

Standardizing the curriculuum is also NOT the answer. Offering MORE choices is. We've been lucky enough to have sent both of our kids to very child friendly private schools, my youngest has since left and gone on to public school. And so far we've been very pleased with her progress there as well.

[Aquinasfan]

Bump for future read. He's the best living writer regarding the nature of modern schooling.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[Amelia]

Did it take John Taylor Gatto all of the 30 years he taught in public schools (plus however many years he attended as a student) to figure this out, or did he just wait until he was eligible for retirement to "see the truth" and start speaking out?