Heating and air conditioning - The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

Author

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

Oscar_Lives

2006-05-21, 12:21 pm

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

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 system-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
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 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 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."

The next year, the Rockefeller education Board-which funded the creation of
numerous public schools-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 population-mainly
the children of the captains of industry and government-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 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."

http://www.thememoryhole.com/edu/school-mission.htm

komobu

2006-05-21, 7:21 pm

Here in Korea, their education system preschool through high school is
supposedly rated in the top ten in the world. I can really believe it.
Their high school kids go to tutor classes after school through as late
as 12 am every night except Sunday. Then they do their homework for
regular school. Most get 5 hours of sleep at night. All they do is
study. The memorization skills that I have seen of theese kids is
unbelievable. There is a lot of pressure on them because when they take
their college entrance exam, they only get one shot at it. They can
never take it again. They also have a very high teenage suicide rate
because of the stress that it put on them to do good in school.

As good as their primary school system is, their universities are a
joke. The hard part is getting in. Once youre in however, they have a
98% pass rate. It is virtually impossible to flunk out. Most of them
want to go to universities abroad.

Everything here is about memorization and being part of the group. No
free thoughts are allowed. If you are a free thinker, you are quickly
ostracized. As a result, most new technology is always discovered in
the west. The east is then able to capitalize on the ideas by teaching
the concepts in their primary schools.

Pat

.p.jm@see_my_sig_for_address.com

2006-05-21, 8:21 pm

On 21 May 2006 15:19:05 -0700, "komobu" <curranpg@gmail.com> wrote:

>Here in Korea, their education system preschool through high school is
>supposedly rated in the top ten in the world. I can really believe it.
>Their high school kids go to tutor classes after school through as late
>as 12 am every night except Sunday. Then they do their homework for
>regular school. Most get 5 hours of sleep at night. All they do is
>study. The memorization skills that I have seen of theese kids is
>unbelievable. There is a lot of pressure on them because when they take
>their college entrance exam, they only get one shot at it. They can
>never take it again. They also have a very high teenage suicide rate
>because of the stress that it put on them to do good in school.

We have a test here you have to pass to get a HS diploma,
proving you are educated to at least a 7th grade level.

Of course, some judge just threw it out becuase it's not fair
to peopel who don't speak English, they should get diplomas too, he
says !!!!

>As good as their primary school system is, their universities are a
>joke. The hard part is getting in. Once youre in however, they have a
>98% pass rate. It is virtually impossible to flunk out. Most of them
>want to go to universities abroad.

Most of us would settle for the broad.

>Everything here is about memorization and being part of the group. No
>free thoughts are allowed. If you are a free thinker, you are quickly
>ostracized. As a result, most new technology is always discovered in
>the west. The east is then able to capitalize on the ideas by teaching
>the concepts in their primary schools.
>
>Pat

Always been that way - we invent it, the chinks mass-produce
it.

--
Click here every day to feed an animal that needs you today !!!
http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/

Paul ( pjm @ pobox . com ) - remove spaces to email me
'Some days, it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.'
'With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.'
HVAC/R program for Palm PDA's
Free demo now available online http://pmilligan.net/palm/

Murdentech

2006-05-23, 10:21 am

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

It is true that the education blueprint developed in the late 1800's and
largely still used today was designed by industrial barons like Rockefeller
to supply the labor force in our country. There was an interesting article
on the History channel about this and about how our model of education needs
to change.

Many of the old schools had swimming class and the buildings were furnished
with indoor pools. The purpose of swim time was not so much for educational
purposes, but for bathing the inner city kids... perhaps not such a bad idea
for today's inner city kids.

Even though the model is designed to support a manufacturing industrial
base, it's better than no education at all, which is what is occurring with
today's drop-out rate.

We all need to support vocational schools and encourage shop classes that
teaches hands-on skills. If one has basic hands-on skills he or she is at
least employable.

Also interesting, the converse of the urban education model in earlier times
was farming. If you grew up on a farm you learned many skills. You had to be
able to fix things on the farm in order to survive... everything from
planting food to re-roofing the barn to rebuilding the tractor was an
important skill.... this of course had an effect on the education system in
that children were let out of school to work the farm.

Oscar_Lives

2006-05-23, 9:21 pm

"Murdentech" <j. murden@i nsightbb .com> wrote in message
news:EdqdnW_9L63QYu_ZRVn-tg@insightbb.com...
>
>
> It is true that the education blueprint developed in the late 1800's and
> largely still used today was designed by industrial barons like
> Rockefeller to supply the labor force in our country. There was an
> interesting article on the History channel about this and about how our
> model of education needs to change.
>
> Many of the old schools had swimming class and the buildings were
> furnished with indoor pools. The purpose of swim time was not so much for
> educational purposes, but for bathing the inner city kids... perhaps not
> such a bad idea for today's inner city kids.
>
> Even though the model is designed to support a manufacturing industrial
> base, it's better than no education at all, which is what is occurring
> with today's drop-out rate.
>
> We all need to support vocational schools and encourage shop classes that
> teaches hands-on skills. If one has basic hands-on skills he or she is at
> least employable.

Don't forget the important employability/leadership/soft skills. Students
need to learn to value the traits like honesty, punctuality, loyalty,
lifelong learning, continuous improvement, communications, getting along
well with others, teamwork, community service, citizenship, etc.

It takes more than just readin', writin', rithmetic, and good with the
hands....

>
> Also interesting, the converse of the urban education model in earlier
> times was farming. If you grew up on a farm you learned many skills. You
> had to be able to fix things on the farm in order to survive... everything
> from planting food to re-roofing the barn to rebuilding the tractor was an
> important skill.... this of course had an effect on the education system
> in that children were let out of school to work the farm.

Aggies also value the leadership skills that FFA teaches. Farming is < 2%
of our nation's employment, but yet Agriculture education is the largest
vocational program in the US.

LinkBot