Confederacy of Dunces
John Taylor Gatto page
An Underground History of American Education
"Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the President; their job is to choose which pre-thought thoughts, which received opinions, they like best. The élite in this new empire of ignorance are those who know the most pre-thought thoughts.
Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision."
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"The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far. "
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Also search for
"Stanford Experiment". You can also see what "educated" people who were good citizens in their own country did at Abu Ghraib. There are thousands of other examples. The Nazis, the
Milgram Experiment .
What people who were not given the chance develop themselves and think for themselves do, when they get some freedom from supervision, from law. They can't be what we call "good" people without authority. They never learned it - and this cannot be taught, it has to come from one's own experience. Experience which is denied to them as children. By everyone around them. Parents, teachers - the system. The system itself maintained by the same robots repeating what they have been told.
"Do not look at the finger or you will miss the Moon". A teacher can only point the way. Then let the student develop his own thinking. Modern schools fill people with information and do not create the environment for them to think for themselves. As free humans. Children waste their lives sitting in a room. Never really learning to be responsible for themselves.
Some videos :
I am not against learning, I am against "formal education".
Children are not "antisocial" or "lazy". Our schools and society make them to be like that.
I remember as a child doing stuff - which now seems to be as a lot of "work". Building stuff, at one time I even liked solving math problems. But hated homework. Outside of school I did lots of things - but if any of these would have been "taught" at school suddenly they would have become very boring. Liked to read - but hated anything the school gave me to read.
Children like to experiment, to find out stuff . There are no "stupid children". That is a modern myth. Just bored to death by this "education".
I remember how excited I was at school when we entered the chemistry lab. But we only did experiments when the teacher allowed us to. And boredom ruled again. At least 8 years of a child's life spent in a room where he is always told what to do and never allowed
even to move from his seat.
That is brainwashing. Conditioned to obey. Taught not to think for yourself. Because if you think - you say :"what am I doing here ?". But you can't leave. So you give up thinking. Accept the situation. Forget you are a free human - if you ever had the chance to know you are.
Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Quote:
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Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority
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Molding Minds - Ascent of Humanity
Quote:
These features of schooling were designed into it from the very beginning, as stated very explicitly by such guiding organizations as Rockefeller's General Education Board :
In our dreams. . . people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. . . .
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