3 Edu. I'll be reading some chapters from John Taylor Gatto

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, ", 1992, his writing on education. Here is a really powerful segment from it: It's really scathing!

I am going to starts some readings on education. There are many issues and some authors suggest what to build on and others tell what must go. There is much to be for & against. We’ll see how far I get with it, but it all is fascinating.
_____________ Here’s Gatto:

Meaning that's not just disconnected facts, is what every sane human being seeks, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with the facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense, because of a good-natured and simple relationship between "let's do this" and "let's do that". It's just assumed to mean something, and the clientele has not consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

The first lesson I teach.

But must I teach the Un-Relating of Everything, and infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making some order. In a world where home is only a ghost, because both parents work, or because of too many moves, or too many job changes, or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relationship, I teach you how to accept that confusion as your destiny.

The second lesson I teach.

I frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though from my own experience I know that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I never outright lie, but I've come to see that the "Truth and School-teaching" (are at the bottom), incompatible, just as Socrates said.

The third lesson I teach.

Indeed, the lesson of the "period bells" is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about Anything? Years of Bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy all past and all future, rendering every interval the same, even though they are not.

Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By gold stars and red check marks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school - not even the right of free speech, as ruled by the Supreme Court.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency:  GOOD Students wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make meaning out of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I must then enforce. If I'm told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants.

SUCCESSFUL children do the thinking that I assign them with minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

The sixth lesson I teach.

Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends on this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren't trained to be dependent; the social services could barely survive; they would vanish, I think they would go into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look in horror as the supply of psychic-invalids dried up. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun.

The seventh lesson I teach.

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my students' parents; only a small number can imagine any different way to do things. "The kids have to know how to read and write don't they? The have to know how to add and subtract, don't they? They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job."

No, - the truth is that reading, writing and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks about it, and then to move fast while the mood is on.

Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or even simple justice.

All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life is so alienated from common human reality I am convinced it is wrong and most people would agree with me if they could perceive any alternative.

We might be able to see that there is:
Confusion
Class Position
Indifference
Emotional and Intellectual dependency
Conditional Self-Esteem and
Acceptance of Surveillance

These are the lessons of the prime training for the permanent underclass, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic; to regulate the poor. Schooling through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children; our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. Any common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools, like the dialectic, would be quickly torn to shreds. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like the church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

It's time we squarely face the fact that institutional school-teaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives my seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is so deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering can ever fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that the schools require would cost much less than we are spending now.

All the pathologies we've considered, come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent the children from keeping important appointments with themselves, and with their families, - to learn the lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love - and lessons in service to others too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.

A future is rushing down upon our culture that will insist all of us learn the wisdom of the non-material experience; a future that will demand as the price of survival, that we follow a path of natural life economical in the material costs. These lessons cannot be learned in the schools as they are. School is a 12-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. And society will not avoid this trajectory without immense suffering.

I teach school, and I win awards doing it, so I should know.

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