The Curse of Public Education

Note: This is the first time I have written here on this subject. It is also my 100th post. This seems fitting.

http://thedailybell.com/2628/Hey-Teachers-%E2%80%A6-Leave-Them-Kids-Alone

As I have mentioned before, I am torn as to which is the worse evil foisted on the people of the West: central banking or central education. I remain torn.

It is criminal to think that students nationwide should somehow fit into a single mold. Don’t tell me about charter schools, magnet schools, private schools, etc. Yes there are differences, a few major, almost all minor. But for 98% of the student population, the differences are immaterial. Learn to be obedient, learn by memorizing trivialities, learn to conform. Or face punishment and be ostracized.

And then we wonder (on this site and other alternative-view sites) why most people fawn over what their political “leaders” tell them.

John Taylor Gatto has written several books on this subject. He was an award winning teacher in New York City; often railed against by various administrators for his practices of actually “educating” students as opposed to “schooling” them. I offer some comments from one of his books, wonderfully entitled “Weapons of Mass Instruction.”

In it, he often mentions the names Rockefeller and Carnegie as men behind the significant increase in clamor for public funding and centralization of education in the US. He identifies the early “pioneers” of this movement, often funded with endowment money from (or otherwise connected to) the fortunes of these two industry titans.

The following are all points taken from this book:

He quotes H.L. Mencken: “The aim [of public education] is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality”

Professor Arthur Calhoun wrote that the fondest wish of utopian thinkers was coming true: children were passing from blood families “into the custody of community experts.”

Gatto cites statistics on literacy as measured by US Army tests of potential recruits – literacy defined as a fourth grade reading proficiency. From WWII to the Korean War, literacy dropped from 96% to 81%. By Vietnam, it fell to 73%.

In 1940, national literacy for blacks was measured at 80%; despite ALL the disadvantages to those in this population, four out of five were literate. Six decades later, the number fell to 60%. Twice the number were now illiterate.

All this despite the money spent on schooling in real terms having increased by 350%.

From a student-teacher letter to the editor in 1995: 113 years earlier, fifth graders in Minneapolis were reading Shakespeare, Thoreau, Washington, Twain, Franklin, and many others. Today, this student teacher is told fifth graders are not to be expected to correctly spell: back, big, call, came, can (the list continues with 30 similarly “complicated” words).

According to William Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, the tool to build such a society [amicable folk waiting around for someone to tell them what to do] was psychological alienation. Alienate children from themselves so they could no longer turn inward for strength, alienation from families, traditions, religions, cultures – so no outside source of advise could contradict the will of the political state.

Gatto continues much further, obviously. If you weren’t already sickened by the centralization of education before you read one of his books, you most certainly would be afterwards – assuming you had an ounce of individuality left in you after years of regimentation.

I have referred to a statement by R.J. Rushdoony before; I do so again – but this time by quoting Gary North:

R. J. Rushdoony had little patience with conservatives who complained about high taxes. “They have tithed their children to the State, and then they complain against how much the government is costing them.” He thought all such tax protests would come to nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly. Mass inflation.

We suffer under central banking because we suffer under central education. Yet most parents are happy to be relieved of the burden of raising their children. The world is crumbling all around them and many don’t see it. Or if they see it, they are oblivious as to understand the underlying causes.

The state will educate your children. A more damnable concept cannot be invented (well, that and central banking). What should be seen as a curse, something to run from, is instead seen as a relief.