Schools Cause Ignorance

01 Saturday Oct 2022

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At the “higher” ed level. Read this:

Another Inconvenient Truth

In 2006, the University of Connecticut set out to discover how much learning happens in a student between entering as freshmen and graduating as a senior. Five academic areas were selected to measure, using 14,000 students at 50 American colleges, including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown. At 16 of those 50 – including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown – graduating seniors knew less than incoming freshmen. Negative growth had occurred. In the other 34, no measurable change had taken place.

A bald summary might look like this: after spending an average of six years in search of a BA degree or its equivalent, and spending an average of a quarter million in cash and loans, a great many young people had nothing or even less than nothing to show for the investment. What they had was a piece of magical paper. This is a script out of the Marx Brothers.

-John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, pp. 37 – 38 (2010).

Sadly, this is not isolated in the colleges. I noticed a similar pattern while researching K-12s. Pick a school system and then look at the assessed test scores or other metrics from elementary through high school. One will notice that the longer a child is in the grips of these failed, deadly institutions, the less the child knows about a given subject. I randomly picked a feeder system, elementary, middle, and high school-levels, in the former state of Georgia to make this point. I used math. Let’s have a look at the effectiveness of the “lessons”.

5th grade: 14% math proficiency (stellar, huh?);

8th grade: 11.9%;

HS Algebra: 7%…

I understand that theoretically the level of difficulty increases as the grades advance, but learning is supposedly cumulative, right? And it’s not just in this one dead system. Just pick a system and test it. And it’s, ala the UCONN study, in the colleges as well. Why? Because – hang onto something – the schools were designed to destroy or cripple thinking rather than impart knowledge. To that wicked end, they are smashingly effective.

When America was an industrial nation, this system built docile, semi-literate workers for factories. In this day and age, as there is little to nothing for the kids to do once they graduate, it makes perverse sense to retard them as far as possible. That, and the primary focus of the schools has since shifted from faux-indoctrination to Moloch fodder-making.

However one slices it, no child should be subjected to this rank evil. And no semblance of even partially-advanced civilization will survive such a system. The results are already upon us. The organized schools were conceived with ill intent. Now, they are purely destructive and dangerous. It’s time to end them.

Weapons of Mass Instruction

27 Tuesday Sep 2022

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Having recently read it, I have added a third book by the late, great John Taylor Gatto to my education resources page. And I highly recommend Weapons of Mass Instruction.

In general, it is a shorter but thrilling expansion of his older books. But it includes a few personal stories of his I was unaware of – but not surprised by. Its also full of more examples of how the schools were designed to fail and wreck society and more examples of great men who defied the system and thrived.

Interestingly, Gatto got a very few things wrong. At the time of his writing, he still believed the tech giants were good guys. He’s to be forgiven for that as well as his false conflation of IQ realism and related matters.

All in all, a very good book by an American hero. Homeschool, unschool, be free, survive, and prosper.

No One Believes: the Evil of the Schools

23 Friday Sep 2022

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A great but terrible blast from the educational past: the late John Taylor Gatto’s acceptance speech, as teacher of the year, from 1990:

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world’s narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn’t buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse – and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching – that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.

It probably does not interest the average American. Not then, certainly not now. But it should – read the whole thing. Find and read some of Gatto’s books. Schools didn’t fail this year. Nor in 1990. they were designed and built, from the very start, as failure incarnate. In a sense, they have succeeded impressively. For that, they should be completely destroyed.

Note that, in 1990, homeschool children “seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.” That difference, then, was mainly a comparison to the government schools, though it applied also to privates. Now, I suspect it directly applies to most all private schools with the publics not even registering. Does that interest anyone? The homeschoolers perhaps.

That is the only sane and workable solution – teach children by allowing them to learn. That cannot be accomplished in the formal pedo-victim factories where most people stupidly send their kids. Stop abusing children and stop destroying civilization.

John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018), American Hero

03 Saturday Nov 2018

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You may not know his name but he fought for you and your children. On the battlefield of America’s public schools. His only interest was in the promotion of learning. What a concept.

Gatto was the teacher we needed. He will be missed and hard to replace.

Over the course of his career, Gatto was recognized by other educators for the rapport he had built with his students. While other teachers were spending much of their day on behavioral management issues, Gatto’s students were actively engaged in his lectures and genuinely excited about learning. When faculty members would come to him seeking advice, his prescription was simple: treat your students the same way you treat anyone else.

Above all, Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents to share with the rest of the world. They didn’t want to be talked down to but longed to be treated with respect and dignity. He recognized that their worth was not determined by the neighborhoods where they lived, their parents’ annual salaries, or the scores they received on standardized tests. He concluded that “genius,” is “as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

After three decades in the classroom, Gatto realized that the public school system was squashing individualism more than it was educating students and preparing them for the real world. To make matters worse, his later research would reveal that this dumbing down was not just by accident, but by design.

Upon his realization, he resigned in protest and in order to further the truth and freedom. We, now, must take up the work.

Valediction

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by perrinlovett in News and Notes

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As I type this bit up I am listening to several of my friends discuss the graduation of their several children from high school. It’s that time of year. All across America eighteen-year-olds are preparing to say goodbye to lifelong friends, to embrace college, to join the workforce, and to become adults. It is a joyful time.

The local fish wrapper ran, today, a separate pictorial section dedicated to our young people, their early accomplishments and their future plans. In particular the paper dwelt upon the lives and missions of the valedictorians and salutatorians of local schools. These are young men and women who are poised to go far in life.

The news calls them the “best and brightest.” By the popular measure of educational achievement, this moniker fits. However, these words are today minced in a somewhat incorrect manner. “Valedictorian” and “salutatorian” come from Latin roots – valediction and saluation. The former is a farewell, the latter a greeting.

At ceremonies coast to coast these meanings serve a justifiable purpose. The valedictorian speaks first to bid the class farewell to the sheltered academic lives the members have known. The salutatorian then speaks to the promise of the coming years. Or, something like that.

Those acquainted with the works of John Taylor Gatto or who have children of school age, surely understand the decline of quality in American public education. Gatto was formerly New York’s teacher of the year (State and City). His distinguished career spanned decades. Now he speaks and writes of the critical need for drastic school reform. His writing is frequently published at lewrockwell.com. He is the author of The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling (2000).

Gatto has related the American model of public education to Soviet-era brainwashing:

Two years before I ran across that Atlantic broadside, I encountered a different analysis in the financial magazine Forbes. I was surprised to discover Forbes had correctly tracked the closest inspiration for school psychologizing, both its aims and its techniques, to the pedagogy of China and the Soviet Union. Not similar practices and programs, mind you, identical ones. The great initial link with Russia, I knew, had been from the Wundtian Ivan Pavlov, but the Chinese connection was news to me. I was unaware then of John Dewey’s tenure there in the 1920s, and had given no thought, for that reason, to its possible significance:

The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs…they are not isolated idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers. Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao.

The Forbes writer, Thomas Sowell, perhaps invoking the slave states in part to rouse the reader’s capitalist dander, could hardly have been aware himself how carefully industrial and institutional interest had seeded Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands with the doctrine of psychological schooling long ago, nearly at the beginning of the century, and in Japan’s case even before that. All along we have harvested these experimental growths in foreign soil for what they seem to prove about people-shaping.

– Gatto, The Empty Child, Chapter 13 of The Underground History of American Public Education (2000).

“Slaves,” “people-shaping,” and “brainwashing” are alarming and damning. However, from my experience I find them succient and apt discriptions of American education.

I was lucky growing up. I had a slew of teachers, older and steeped in the traditions of real education – the old school way, who actually dared and cared to teach. I remember them fondly. Also, in high school, college and graduate school I possessed a hard-headed resilience and independence which plagues me to this day. You may sense in my writing.

Today schools are little more than prisons crossbred with day care centers. Our children are marched around like cattle by overweight nitwits. They are subjected to communist indoctrination and cultural immorality. State-worship is everywhere. Rules must be obeyed perfectly. Freakism of every strip is revered. God is banned from the building.

In all this idiocy the one thing missing is teaching – learning and educational experiment are vacant in our public schools. They are unwanted qualities among the people. As George Carlin used to say, the system wants people just smart enough to operate the machines and file the paper – they do not want educated people capable of free thought or consideration.

By the grace of God Almightly the “best and brightest” are often times exempted from this nonesense. Many possess those rebellious traits I hold dear. Many are allowed to pursue real studies in real academic subjects. These are statistical outliers. The other children, the majority, are treated like sheep and criminals.

A boy in West Virginian was recently ARRESTED for wearing a t-shirt which expressed support for the NRA and the Second Amendment. No-one was bothered by the shirt. The lad harmed none. However, the Second Amendment representing the last hope of freedom for oppressed people (like students), the shirt had to be banned and demonized. In an overreaction typical of modern schools administrators, the teacher and principal called the local Gestapo. The child was led away in handcuffs – for wearing a shirt.

The charges were later dismissed by an honest judge. However, great damage has been done. The boy’s mother is suing the school for violating her son’s civil rights. Go mama!

Long ago, public schools had civics classes. In those classes the Constitution, its traditions and foundations were taught. This included the second amendment and the necessary right and obligation of rebellion against tyranny. Revolution was celebrated. Today, as best I can gather, such thought or instruction would constitute a criminal offense. Our babes are taught the government is the end all and be all of human existence. Its supremacy and place must never be challenged.

This is a crime, in and of itself, equal with all the positive modern instruction concerning dependence, homosexuality, death culture, etc. Anything goes and is okay, our children are taught, so long as it does not make any sense. I imagine that math, being completely based on absolute truth, is completely absent from the new schools. Robots and foreigners can always add for us. This subtracts from the ability of our people to independently endure. It cries out for vengeance. Most ears are deaf to that cry.

Back to our new graduates … the fish-wrapper relayed to its readers how a valedictorian and salutatorian of a local high school treated their classmates to the verse and wisdom of Dr. Seuss. This is a commonality in schools these days. Oh, the places you’ll go… This small child’s book was read, in part, in one of my law classes. Maybe it was at our graduation. It was foolish and inappropriate.

(Dr. Seuss, keeping children and adults shit stupid since 1937. Google.)

What kind of world is it when the words of Jesus, Jefferson and Cicero are absent and replaced by the sophomoric rhymes of the kindergarten? Seuss is the level of the new school – childish, pointless, and optimistically vacuous.

Were I permitted to address a graduating class I too would present a Seuss book. I would introduce the Cat in the Hat. I would then rip it in half, throw it on the floor and proceed to tell the children that they were, that day, freed from one form of government oppression. I would congratulate them for surviving without arrest records. I would then extol them of the crucial importance of real learning. Never let schooling interfere with education. Never let education interfere with learning. Question everything. Accept no mastery. Put down with brutality that slavery prepared for your adult lives. I would never be invited back again.

Before I wrote about my experience in college and in law school. I ridiculed myself for opportunities lost and the system for lack of substance. Schooling is what one makes of it. I hope our future generations grasp this. I hope they reject the new theories of dumbed-down complacency. I hope they prosper. Congratulations to the Class of 15.