VLVL2 context: Educational System to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

[pynchonoid]

"The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us
Uneducated and Docile"

[...] How do I know why America's public school system
was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to
eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by
Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded
over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)?
Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented
America's formal educational system in the late 1800s
and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing. 

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are
out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John
Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the
New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the
New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he
became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce
conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity,
inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every
little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig
into terra incognita, the roots of America's
educational system. 

[...] In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers
College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education
at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in
which raw products, children, are to be shaped and
formed into finished products...manufactured like
nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will
come from government and industry." 

[...] Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in
2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright
eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant
disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have
a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant
woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told
us at the state conference that our job is to get them
ready for the work world…that the children have to get
used to not being stimulated all the time or they will
lose their jobs in the real world." 

[...] John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground
History of American Education: An Intimate
Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling
(New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001), is the source
for all of the above historical quotes. [...] 

<http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm>


see also:
<http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/>



 




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