The Public School Nightmare

THE KOSSOR EDUCATION NEWSLETTER ^ | 1996 | John Taylor Gatto

[mafree]

This is a good essay (it may have been posted before), pointing out the real problem with the recent Education Bill.

[toenail]

FR ought to have a top ten thread list for various topics. This has undoubtedly been posted before, but it is an excellent essay.

[monkeyshine]

Bump for later reading. Public school IS a nightmare. I went to public school and got paroled in 1988. I drove by my old High School recently, they have completely fenced it in with 10 ft fencing -- I swear it looks like a prison.

When I was there they used to chain the doors shut so that kids couldn't cut class. Some bright kids in our class called the fire department and told them it was endangering our lives. The fire dept came and cut the chains, much to the chagrin of the administration (and to much cheering from the students!).

Oh the stories I could tell you about my high school.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

good article

[Cowgirl]

It boggles my mind how parents who went through public school can turn around and send their children to public school. It just shows you how successful the "dumbing down" has been.

[Just another Joe]

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state.

Here it is in a nutshell. If you are a business owner and you find something that makes you a profit - are you going to change it?
Not unless you are convinced that the change will make you more profit.

[FreedomAvatar]

My wife is currently studying for her special educator's license. It is amazing to me the kind of leftist pap that is indoctrinated into teachers these days from their professors.

Case in point: My wife had to study an awful screed by ultra-leftist educator, Peter McLaren, that contained such thick liberal hyperbole as,

...a critical pedagogy that embraces a resistance post-modernism needs to construct a politics of refusal that can provide both the conditions for interrogating the institutionalization of formal equality based on the prized imperative of a white, Anglo male world and for creating spaces to facilitate an investigation of the way in which dominant institutions must be transformed so that they no longer serve simply as conduits for a motivated indifference to victimization for a Euroimperial aesthetics, for depredations of economic and cultural dependency, and for the production of asymmetrical relations of power and privilege...

This is the kind of elitist, anti-male, anti-Western mantra they're preaching in the name of "tolerance" and "multi-cultural solidarity".

Thank goodness my wife is too smart to buy into any of this soporific swill.

[Teacher317]

Is that what the definition of is is?

[=Intervention=]

Funny. The same thing happened to my old high school. I see a trend here, or perhaps a visual representation of the spiritual and mental reality that has existed for years. Chains and walls keep the parents out, and keep the children in.

[Teacher317]

So our masters (representatives) profit with ever increasing revenues and willing sheeple to vote them in perpetuity. Now the question is, how do we put them out of business?

[Just another Joe]

Seems to me that there are two possibilities.
Number 1 is to homeschool.
Number two is that we go back to the older way of finding and hiring a teacher. The parents band together, interview and hire a teacher for their combined children whether that person has a teaching certificate or a degree.
If the parents are satisfied with the amount of learning their children are getting from that person, they stay hired. If not the parents find someone else.

I did this in another fashion when I moved out of the KC MO school district.
I was not satisfied with the learning in the KC MO school district so when we decided to move I made it perfectly clear, CRYSTAL CLEAR to any real estate agent that I talked with that I would not even look at a house in the KC MO school district.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

You need to read this old post
Attitude Channeling and Brainwashing (Absolutely Incredible)

[Libertarianize the GOP]

re: #13

[toenail]

KCMO government schools suck. STLMO government schools suck. I live two minutes walking distance from one of the "best" government elementary schools in MO, and I'll never put any kid of mine in it.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

...a critical pedagogy that embraces a resistance post-modernism needs to construct a politics of refusal that can provide both the conditions for interrogating the institutionalization of formal equality based on the prized imperative of a white, Anglo male world and for creating spaces to facilitate an investigation of the way in which dominant institutions must be transformed so that they no longer serve simply as conduits for a motivated indifference to victimization for a Euroimperial aesthetics, for depredations of economic and cultural dependency, and for the production of asymmetrical relations of power and privilege...

And this is just a portion of a sentence. If it wasn't for "white, Anglo male," and "Euroimperial," I would have no idea what he is talking about. Somebody (probably taxpayers) actually pays this guy to write this crap. And he's only one member of the horde which has been working for most of a century to eradicate genuine education from our nation. Separation of school and state is our only hope.

[headsonpikes]

End the War on Children; Abolish Public Schools!

[rejoicing]

...not to mention that it's written with so many ridiculously pompous-sounding words that it's extremely hard to grasp the meaning..........or maybe that's the point.

[irgbar-man]

Take the per pupil spending in an average suburban district (call it $7,000).
Give it back to the parents.
Ten families get together and hire a teacher who gets paid handsomely.

But we homeschool. It makes individuals out of teacher and student.

[FourPeas]

It boggles my mind how parents who went through public school can turn around and send their children to public school.

It boggles mine, too. This is precisely the reason we homeschool. However, when I explain this to people, they look at me as if I'm trying to convince them that space aliens landed in my back yard.

FP