The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.
The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
As I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do.
Tag: books
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 6)
…between 1967 and 1974, teacher training in the United States was covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations, select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all coordinated through the U.S. Office of Education and through key state education departments like those in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Important milestones of the transformation were: 1) an extensive government exercise in futurology called Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, and 3) Benjamin Bloom’s multivolume Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, an enormous manual of over a thousand pages which, in time, impacted every school in America. While other documents exist, these three are appropriate touchstones of the whole, serving to make clear the nature of the project underway.
Take them one by one and savor each. Designing Education, produced by the Education Department, redefined the term “education” after the Prussian fashion as “a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character.” State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of local schools with central directives. Each state education department was assigned the task of becoming “an agent of change” and advised to “lose its independent identity as well as its authority,” in order to “form a partnership with the federal government.”
The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (B10). The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators — nothing less than “impersonal manipulation” through schooling of a future America in which “few will be able to maintain control over their opinions,” an America in which “each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number” which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that “chemical experimentation” on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced schooling.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one “in which a small elite” will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant they need to be controlled and regulated for society’s good. Under such a logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions.
Quote of the Day – John Taylor Gatto (Pt. 5)
From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
—
I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley’s Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and why. As Cubberley puts it:
It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking…[is] opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor.
The statement occurs in a section of Public Education called “A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence,” in which Cubberley explains that “the coming of the factory system” has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the “all conquering march of machinery”), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.
Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. According to Cubberley, with “much ridicule from the public press” the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and “a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad.” That last mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of dumbed-down schooling common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world coal-powers (other than the United States), each of which had already converted its common population into an industrial proletariat.
Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 Social History of the Family notified the nation’s academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family “into the custody of community experts.” He offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education “designed to check the mating of the unfit.” Three years later, Mayor John F. Hylan of New York said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus would seize prey, by “an invisible government.” He was referring specifically to certain actions of the Rockefeller Foundation and other corporate interests in New York City which preceded the school riots of 1917.
The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling as well as for the stock market. In 1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed, “It is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world.”
Quote of the Day – Your Teacher Said WHAT?! Edition
Last one from this book:
Progressivism may be hysterical, but it isn’t in retreat; it’s on the attack. And it retains a powerful set of channels for communicating its philosophy, including television, newspapers, and the Internet.
Oh, and the schools.
Toward the end of the 2010 school year, and therefore the writing of this book, Blake brought home a writing project for her fifth-grade class entitled “Understanding Environmental Concerns.” Here’s a sample.
Today you read about the environment and the importance of your country’s natural resources. Currently a conflict exists between people who want to reduce the amount of chemicals in the air in order to protect the environement, and those who say it hurts business if we limit the amount of emissions they release.
Now, if you’re going to load a question for a bunch of ten-year-olds, you couldn’t really do much better than this: The conflict is between people who want to protect the evnironment and those who want to help (or at least not hurt) business. Environment or business: Pick one.
But teachers aren’t pushing a Progressive agenda! Just ask ’em!
As one commenter here has noted, they don’t see it for the same reason fish don’t notice water – they’re swimming in it.
Quote of the Day – Progressive Edition
From Your Teacher Said WHAT?!:
The desire to regulate economic life might be the defining characteristic of Progressive philosophy. It combines a mistrust of the free market in allocating resources; an appeal to a vague and indefinable virtue (“fairness”); a desire to achieve perfection in economic outcomes; a deference to experts over the judgement of ordinary folks; and, best of all, a chance to tell other people what to do. Oh, heck, let’s just say it: Regulation is progressivism.
It is also the perfect way to illustrate just how much Progressive thinking depends on treating adults like kids.
From Chapter 10, June 2010: 99.985 Percent Pure: The Price of Regulation
Your Teacher Said WHAT?!
I recently received a copy of Joe and Blake Kernen’s book, Your Teacher Said WHAT?!: Trying to Raise a Fifth Grade Capitalist in Obama’s America. I’m about halfway through it. Joe Kernen is an anchor of MSNBC’s morning show Squawk Box. Blake is his young daughter – ten years old when this book was started. The impetus for it is explaned in the preface. An excerpt:
…a couple of years ago, I found the first truly worthwhile reason to rant about the economy. It wasn’t unfunded mandates, Medicare insolvency, CEO compensation, or the federal deficit.
It was one nine-year-old girl. And that same girl – by the time you read this she’ll be eleven, going on twenty – is the reason for this book.
She’s not what I rant about, of course. From the day Blake Alexandra Kernen was born, the day after Christmas in 1999, she’s done hardly anything worth complaining about.
—
By the time Blakes’s brother, Scott Joseph, showed up two years later, I was an old hand at worrying. In fact, by then I had found an entirely new and durable thing to worry about. Like any father, I worried about whether I would measure up – whether I would succeed in doing for Blake and Scott what my parents had done for me: giving them the values that reflected what their mother and I cherished most. We wanted our kids to believe in God, love their country, and respect the principles of hard work and fairness. We wanted them to value honesty, courage, and kindness, to be polite and respectful.
Simple, right? After all, these principles are widely shared in twenty-first-century America. Our church teaches us that we are obliged to care for people who can’t care for themselves; our schools reward hard work and demand respect. Kids learn good sportsmanship from playing tennis and soccer. The heroes of their favorite movies and television programs are generally pretty brave (though occasionally a little goofy; SpongeBob, anyone?).
With one exception. Penelope and I are capitalists – and not just because we’ve done pretty well out of the capitalist system. We believe that free-market capitalism is not only the most powerful engine for human prosperity ever but also history’s strongest force for freedom and human advancement. We beleive – no, we know – that economic freedom is as important as religioius freedom or freedom of speech. We believe that productive work, freely exchanged, is a virtue, just like charity freely given.
Please don’t misunderstand this. We’re not teaching Blake and Scott that their purpose in life is to get as rich as possible; it’s to make sure that everyone is as free as possible. For us, the only difference between defending economic freedom and defending religious freedom is that while the mainstream culture offers no real opposition to the many ways in which Americans worship, there is a powerful current of antagonism toward the way they do business.
Some of the attacks on free-market capitalism are overt: the idea, for example, that capitalism is unavoidably brutal, or at least immoral. Some are of the moren-in-sorrow-than-anger category, such as the notion that we should increase the benefits of the free market by taxing and regulating it into submission. Many are specific to the issues of the moment, like the idea that the best solution to the unsustainable growth of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare is to make them grow even faster (you can’t make up some of this stuff).
And that is something worth ranting about: not anything my kids do, but what is being done to them.
A little later:
…if you’re anything like me, I can guarantee that your jaw will drop the same way mind did once I started paying attention to the hostility to free-market capitalism that infects almost every movie and television show your kids are watching.
And later still:
One thing I learned is that the most powerful way in which nine- or ten-year-olds resemble grown-up Progressives is in their love of regulating things. There’s just no way Blake can see something that’s not good for you – like smoking cigarettes, or eating too much fast food – without wanting a law to ban it.
And from chapter 1:
“My teacher says the recession is the banks’ fault.”
“That’s way too simple, Blake. For something as big as this recession, there’s a lot of blame to go around.”
“And my teacher says it’s ’cause we care too much about buying stuff, and it might not be so bad if we stopped.”
“Your teacher said . . . what?“
So far, this is an excellent book for pretty much anybody, not just capitalist parents of young children – but especially for them. And especially if they’re the victims of our now anti-capitalist culture. But the previous excerpts aren’t the Quote-of-the-Day. This is, from Chapter 4, October 2009: Who made my shoelaces?:
Now, I know that Progressives aren’t all, or maybe even mostly, socialists, but that’s a little like saying that they only have a chronic head cold instead of tuberculosis. When it comes to the economy, Progressives have a reflexive distrust of the market, and for the same reason that Scott does: They believe that it’s just as sensible to trust an economic system designed and operated by no one as it is to be a passenger in a car without a driver. Progressives, who are reliably hostile to the idea of intelligent design in human evolution, are positively ecstatic about it in economic planning.
Of course, intelligent design in biology at least argues that the designer is divine and lives in heaven; in Progressive economics, it just assumes that the designer has a PhD and lives in Washington, D.C.
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society
The Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge program again interviews Thomas Sowell on one of his books, this time it’s the second edition of Intellectuals and Society.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyufeHJlodE?rel=0]
If you don’t have time for the whole interview, I have a couple of excerpts transcribed, the first paragraph being today’s Quote of the Day:
Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals have a great tendency to see poverty as a great moral problem to which they have the solution. Now, the human race began in poverty, so there’s no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is why have some people gotten prosperous, and in particular why some have gotten prosperous to a greater degree than others. But everybody started poor, so poverty is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals. More than that, one of the things I wish I’d put more emphasis on in the book is that intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth, and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists – somehow. It’s like manna from heaven, it’s only a question of how we split it up.
(My emphasis.) That paragraph stands alone, but there’s much more that goes along with it:
Peter Robinson: And why should that be? Why shouldn’t they find that question at least intellectually fascinating?
TS: Because it would destroy the whole vision that they have.
PR: Because it would lead to the answer of free markets…
TS: Well, it would say there are enormous numbers of reasons why people acquire the ability to create wealth, and they vary all over the world. And so, if you find for example that, centuries past, Germans living in Eastern Europe had much higher standards of living than the indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe, intellectuals would say that somehow the Germans had oppressed the people of Eastern Europe. Or the ones that were into genetic determinism would say that the Germans were born biologically superior to the people of Eastern Europe. But anyone with a knowledge of history would know that there are all kinds of reasons why Western Europe as a whole has far greater wealth-producing capacity than Eastern Europe. But of course, that would then cut out the role of intellectuals. They would then have to do what David Hume did, which was he urged his fellow 18th-century Scots to learn the English language because that would open up a whole world to them that they would not have otherwise.
PR: Which leads to another quotation that I found very striking here, in Intellectuals and Society. Part of this you’ve touched on. You write, although intellectuals pay a lot of attention to inequalities among racial and ethnic groups, quote:
“seldom…has this attention been directed…toward how the less economically successful…might improve themselves by availing themselves of the culture of others around them.”
That is a VERY arresting formulation. Poor people can improve themselves by availing themselves of the culture of others around them. What do you mean by that?
TS: I mean that the same things which allow some other people to prosper can allow them to prosper if they take advantage of those same things. The Scots were a classic example. They were one of the poorest and most ignorant people on the fringes of European civilization in centuries past. But once they, for whatever reason, began to educate themselves and especially to learn the English language – which became a passion, people all over Scotland, including Hume himself, were taking lessons in the English language.
PR: Hume’s first language was Gaelic?
TS: I don’t know if it was Gaelic.
PR: It was whatever they spoke in those days.
TS: Yeah. And from about the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, the leading intellectuals in Britain were Scots! I mean, you had Adam Smith in economics, Hume in philosophy, Black in chemistry, you go through the whole list. (Not to mention James Watt.) And so they could do that. But that was an EXTREMELY rare thing for an intellectual to say. Most intellectuals in most countries around the world see the issue as how those who are more prosperous should be brought down, rather than how… and moreover that the people who are lagging should cling to their culture. I don’t know how you’re going to keep on doing what you’ve always done and get results that are different from what you’ve always gotten.
Easy! The culture cannot be wrong, so you do it again, only HARDER! “Assimilation” is availing oneself of the culture around you, and it is what immigrants to this country did for literally decades. But now, around the world immigrants are moving into foreign societies and retaining their cultures. And the intellectuals are telling them to. Sharia law in England, violent sexual assaults on women in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and here at home the culture of inner-city blacks has resulted in a population with a homicide rate more than six times that of the surrounding cultures, but what are they told to do by their so-called “leaders”? Not assimilate!
But we’re not done yet.
At the end of the interview, Robinson asks Sowell about the upcoming elections:
Peter Robinson: Do you have a candidate? As we record this, the Republican primaries are still grinding on.Thomas Sowell: There is none of the candidates of either party that would cause me to dance in the streets.PR: Alright, is there ANYTHING as you look at the current prospect for this country and the Western world that WOULD cause you to dance in the streets?TS: If I thought that the voters had some sense of realism, and that they were concerned with the larger questions rather than whose ex-wife said what and so on, or what Governor Romney did or did not do when he was head of Bain Capital – if they had some sense of the loss of freedom which is infinitely more important than any of the specific issues by themselves, that is Obamacare really is a HUGE step towards the loss of freedom. And it happens in small ways, but constantly. We can’t have the lightbulb that we want in our own home. We can’t flush the toilet with the kind of toilet we want. We can’t take a shower with the kind of showerhead we want. We can’t put our garbage out except broken down by the way that some little Gauleiters have decided we ought to do it. It’s just the accretion of these things, many of which are too small to be significant in themselves, but in the aggregate you can see the tendency of this. The people who think they know better and they ought to be telling us what to do. Those people are the danger, and if you don’t see that, I’m not sure what the future’s going to be like.
We’ve spent a century deliberately constructing a population that has no sense of realism, and it’s not just here, it’s worldwide. The only thing I’m sure of is that future won’t be pleasant.
Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that.
Just to Emphasise that I Am Not an Objectivist
The most recent XKCD:
The rollover text says:
I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at “therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.”
And she’s a terrible novelist. Excellent essayist, but terrible novelist.
In the Mail
I just received a review copy of Your Teacher Said WHAT?!: Trying to Raise a Fifth-Grade Capitalist in Obama’s America, by Joe Kernen and his daughter Blake. I’m not quite finished with Paul Kengor’s Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century, but having just read the preface to Your Teacher Said WHAT?!, it’s interesting seeing the current-day effects of a hundred years of Marxist/socialist influence on education, both primary and higher.
For example, read this excerpt from Dupes, concerning the members of the Weather Underground:
Aside from Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Judy Clark, most of the comrades eluded prison time. Ultimately, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers avoided jail because of charges dropped due to prosecutorial problems. That escape from due justice has since prompted Ayers to celebrate: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird! America is a great country!”Free a a bird to pursue what? Ayers and others may have received the answer to that question as early as 1967, at a pre-Weatherman SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ayers’s academic home. The conference, held July 14-16, 1967, was staged by SDS’s Radical Education Project and titled “Radicals in the Professions.” Dr. Quentin Young, the “SDS doctor” who would turn congressional hearings into a circus the following year, spoke on the importance of radicals entering the field of health care. But at the conference, the student radicals paid particular attention to the American educational establishment, especially higher education, and specifically the departments of education, where they could train the future teachers of America.
Bill Ayers would eventually follow the Deweyan tradition of ushering in social and political change through education rather than politics — the latter of which had failed him and his fellow Marxist-Leninists. He and Dohrn both sought out the ivory tower again. They believed they had a lot to import to America’s youth and its future. (Mark) Rudd, too, eventually ended up in education, teaching and lecturing at colleges. Basically, almost all of them would take that path.
But here’s the kicker:
And the contacts they would make in that capacity are nothing short of awe-inspiring. One of them, yet another product of Columbia University, would — forty years after that conference in Ann Arbor — become a political rallying point for the suddenly reborn SDS and Weather Underground “progressives.” He was a beacon for Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Hayden, Klonsky, Machtinger, Jones and more. They would come to Chicago, this time with a very different take on the man the Democrats were looking to send to the presidency. In 2008 they would organize yet again, this time working within the system, to help make this man — Barack Obama — president of the United States.To achieve that goal, they would need to be very careful in publicly expressing their true feelings and motivations. Otherwise they would risk driving away the masses, especially traditional Democrats, moderates, and crossover voters. They had made that mistake in the initial SDS split, losing the support of a huge number of non-Communists. In 2008 they would be vigilant not to repeat the error.
And they would not receive just complicity but the the aid and support of the media in keeping their “true feelings and motivations” out of the public view. After all, many in the media shared those feelings and motivations, and understood that they were far from “mainstream” thought.
It starts in the primary school classroom, and continues all the way through the university.
To the Nice Checkout Lady at Lowe’s
The story you were looking for is, in fact, in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1. It is Clifford D. Simak’s The Huddling Place from 1944.
And yes, the T-shirt I was wearing today is still available at Cafe Press.