The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

[pisshead]

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
The Memory Hole | February 21 2006

It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.

Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling systemâ??overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.

How can I make such a bold statement? 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 schoolsâ??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 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."
By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberlyâ??the future Dean of Education at Stanfordâ??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."

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Boardâ??which funded the creation of numerous public schoolsâ??issued a statement which read in part:

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:
The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the populationâ??mainly the children of the captains of industry and governmentâ??to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. 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 worldâ?¦that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."

pisshead Reviewed by pisshead on 02-21-2006. The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile The Memory Hole | February 21 2006 It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed Rating: 5

[death of sXe]

the stupidest people i ever met graduated high school fck the system

[beachguy in thongs]

Huh, thanks to my sister, I knew cursive before I even entered the public school system.

[lemonboy]

Wow what a great read. I don't think the solution is to totally dismantle public education though. I've met the most amazing educators who only desire to teach. It's these people that should be holding the reigns and not the politicians. Childhood shouldn't be spent playing sociopolitical guinea pig.

[mont974x4]

The problem is too much government influence

[eg420ne]

Thats why our government can get away with so much-LoL----Ever read The Deliberate DumbingDown of America.. Its a good read, read it here--http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/ http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/

[pisshead]

Wow what a great read. I don't think the solution is to totally dismantle public education though. I've met the most amazing educators who only desire to teach. It's these people that should be holding the reigns and not the politicians. Childhood shouldn't be spent playing sociopolitical guinea pig.

i don't know...why not? i say dismantle the whole fucking thing...it's obviously only doing bad and purposely making kids stupid and not teaching them their rights or history.

imagine what those amazing teachers could do if not in the confines of the federal or state government...

you could choose where your kid went to school...you wouldn't have to pay all those taxes. it's worth a try at least. but then we'd have independent thinkers, which leads to freedom, and we all know our government is basically anti-freedom.

[bonsaiguy]

The problem is too much government influence

The problem is not enough parental influence. ie...parents who think the schools should be raising their kids and teaching them values as opposed to math and reading and the same idiot parents are the first ones to bitch and threaten a lawsuit when little johnny or janey fucks up.

first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers

[bonsaiguy]

i don't know...why not? i say dismantle the whole fucking thing...it's obviously only doing bad and purposely making kids stupid and not teaching them their rights or history.

imagine what those amazing teachers could do if not in the confines of the federal or state government...

you could choose where your kid went to school...you wouldn't have to pay all those taxes. it's worth a try at least. but then we'd have independent thinkers, which leads to freedom, and we all know our government is basically anti-freedom.

You already can choose where your kids go to school. The public school system needs help, no doubt, but hundreds of thousands of brilliant and independent thinking kids come out of them every year thanks to the most underpaid and overworked public employees in the entire government bureaucracy. Starting teachers make between 25k and 35k a year and are often forced to take money from their own pockets to make sure kids have pencils and paper while the administrators make 6 figure salaries and, in the case of one administrator here in MN, a $700 month car allowance which allowed her to lease a Cadillac Escalade and still have money left to pocket. And it cost the district an additonal $150,000 to buy out her contract and fire her ass. If anything we need to rethink how the feds/states spend our tax money in disgusting and ridiculous ways like funding research for huge corporations and supporting other governments that "might" be our allies someday or supplying weapons and training to snakes like Bin Laden and Hussein to "further our interests" in certain regions. (only to have them turn on us when we decide we don't like them anymore) How much money, which could have been routed to education, have we pissed away supporting mexico who then turns on us and refuses to deal with the flow of their own people in to our country so we can deal with them. For the most part, the public school system if a success, it's the people running it who are broken.

Also, see my previous post in this thread about stupid parents and greedy lawyers.

[Nullific]

Having spent the past 13 years of my life in the american education system I can tell you first hand how much it sucks. Now the state says they are upping their standards, first with mandatory state-wide testing that started several several years ago, now they want to start teaching more "core" subjects which includes requiring an extra year of math in high school.
Being a senior my class is the last before these changes go into full effect. I can tell you they wont work though, because it isn't the number of years you're in a subject but rather the fact that the curriculum always blows. Math especially since they tend to "teach" us all this bullshit and yet provide no practical applications for it.
A third of my senior class, or over 105 students are currently failing at least one subject they require for graduation. Maybe we're just a bunch of slacking stoners.