Little Manchurian Candidates

by **CyberChrist** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 7:20 pm

from: <a href="http://www.rense.com/general69/little.htm">www.rense.com/general69/little.htm</a> <div style="text-align:center">"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them." --Tolkien</div> Our six-year-old daughter was so excited to start school. At our first parent-teacher conference, Barb and I expected to hear the usual compliments and heartwarming anecdotes about our bright little angel. From our experiences with activities like T-ball and soccer, or dance and music recitals, we had learned that parents always say nice things about the children of others. If the compliments are sometimes unrealistic or excessive, well, parenting is tough work. We can all use the encouragement. I guess we had been spoiled. Jenny's teacher got right to the point. She had some negatives to address. For one thing, Jenny was struggling with her reading. The teacher confessed that one of the most difficult parts of her job was deflating parents with the news that their children were simply not exceptional. Jenny was, at best, an average reader. She was not an Eagle; she was a Pony. Our job was to learn to enjoy her as a 40-watt bulb rather than a bright light. Was it my imagination, or did this middle-aged matron's sweet smile contain a trace of malice as she related these tidings? I was confused by this assessment of Jenny's reading abilities because it simply didn't fit in with her prior history. She had a love affair with books for her entire childhood. We have a photograph of her at 11 months of age staring earnestly at the contents of an open book. I remember reading to her when she was three. I stopped for some reason, but she continued the narration. She knew her stories by heart. Like many other children, Jenny had learned to read at home. She was a bookworm, and she was an experienced and passionate reader before she ever started first grade. The teacher went on to explain that Jenny cried too much at school and that we needed to correct this problem with the appropriate discipline. Barb and I exchanged glances but didn't argue. We were in shock. I was curious about the crying. Jenny was such a happy child. I asked her that night what made her sad at school. Expecting to hear about something on the playground, I was surprised by her answer. The listening-hour stories made her sad: Once upon a time there was a daddy duck with seven ducklings. They ranged in age down to the youngest (who reminded Jenny of a first grader). The daddy was mean. One day he demanded that all his children learn three tasks, such as running, swimming, and diving. If a duckling was unable to master all of the tasks, he would be banished from the family to live with the chickens. The youngsters struggled under the cruel eye of their father. When it came to diving, the first grader floundered and was sent away to live with the chickens. This was the story Jenny related, in her own words, as an example. I heard it told a second time several years later, by my cousin Nancy, as a sample of objectionable curriculum. We were impressed with the coincidence, since our families resided in different states. Jenny told me she also cried over stories in her readers. They made her sad and frustrated in some way. What a mess! In one evening we had found out that Jenny was unhappy at school, that her teacher thought she was a poor reader and a dim bulb, and that she heard mean tales during listening-hour that I wouldn't repeat to hardened convicts. What in the name of heaven was going on at this school? I was determined to get to the bottom of things. Since they didn't send books home with students in the younger grades, I went to the school the following day and spent a couple of hours reviewing the elementary readers. As I read, my eyes opened wider and wider. I had assumed the purpose of the reading curriculum was to stimulate the juvenile imagination and teach reading skills. Instead, I saw material saturated with, to borrow another parent's language, "an unadvertised agenda promoting parental alienation, loss of identity and self-confidence, group-dependence, passivity, and anti-intellectualism." I once daydreamed through a basic psychology class in medical school which described the work of Pavlov and B.F Skinner in the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that animal (and human) behaviors can be encouraged or discouraged by associating them with pleasure or pain. This is such an obvious fact of nature. It is amazing that anyone would bother to prove it with experimentation, as if the carrot and the stick haven't been used since time began. In behaviorist experiments various stimuli, such as food or electrical shocks, were used as rewards or deterrents. Over time, due to animal memory, a pattern of behavior could be established without food or shocks coming into play. This educational or training process is called "conditioning." With enough conditioning, the dog will stop chasing cars. As I read the stories and poems in Jenny's readers, I was astonished to discover that they were alive, in their own way, with the theories and practices of these dead scientists. But the animals to be trained weren't dogs or rats. They were our young students. Pleasure and pain signals were embedded into the reading material in a consistent way. Given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, and by identifying with the protagonists in the stories, it was our first graders who were "learning" certain attitudes and behaviors. When a child-figure in the stories split away from his group, for example, he would get rained on, his toes would get cold in the snow, or he would experience some other form of discomfort or torment. Similar material was repeated ad infinitum. Through their reading, our students would feel the stinging rain and the pain of freezing toes. They would learn the lesson like one of Pavlov's dogs: avoid the pain, stay with the group. The stories in the readers consistently associated individual initiative with emotional or physical pain. Consider the example of the little squirrel whose wheel falls off his wagon. When he tries to replace it, the wagon rides with an awkward and embarrassing bump, noticeable to his friends, who then tease him about it. Another attempt to repair the wheel results in an accident, with bruising and bleeding and more humiliation. The cumulative effect of this and similar story lines, given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, would be to discourage initiative and reduce self-confidence in the first grader. Animal dads, moms, and grandparents were portrayed over and over in various combinations as mean, stupid, unreliable, bungling, impotent or incompetent. Relationships with their children were almost always dysfunctional; communication and reciprocal trust were non-existent. A toxic mom or dad, for instance, might have stepped in to help our youthful squirrel repair his wagon, only to make matters worse and wreak emotional havoc in the process. Jenny's heart would be lacerated by stories which constantly portrayed parent/child relationships as strained, cruel, or distant. I could see her crying with hurt or frustration. It occurred to me that over the long run, at some level of consciousness, our daughter would have to hold us accountable for permitting her to be tortured in school. Logically, Barb and I had to be stupid, unreliable, uncaring, or impotent, just like the parents in the books. By sending her to school, we were validating the message in her readers, contributing significantly to the parental alienation curriculum. Continuing in her school-based reading series, Jenny's relationship with us would have become tarnished or eroded, and an element of bitterness or cynicism might have crept into her personality. I borrow the term "anti-intellectualism" to describe another dominant theme in the readers. Many of the compositions were, essentially, word salad. They lacked intrinsic interest, coherence, or continuity, and they often demonstrated a sort of anti-rationality. The stories and the corresponding questions seemed to require the student to suspend the natural operations of his intellect, such as the desire to make sense out of things or the impulse to be curious. Under this yoke, a student could learn to hate reading or even thought itself. The following "story" and "comprehension" questions are representative of the anti-intellectualism that I found in the readers: Once upon a time there was a little green mouse who hopped after a tiger onto a yellow airplane. The plane turned into a big red bird in flight, and the mouse turned into a blue pumpkin. The pumpkin fell to the ground and its seeds grew into pots and pans. Blah, blah, blah 1) "What color was the mouse?" 2) "Why do mice turn into pumpkins?" 3) "How do seeds grow?" I can see children getting frustrated over material like this. It is debatable as to which facet of the exercise is more onerous, the reading or the "comprehension." I almost incline to the latter. Among other concerns, I wonder if it is a good thing to pressure children to respond to stupid or unanswerable questions. Such a process would lead to passivity and a loss of confidence, to a little engine that couldn't. According to Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, repetition of unpleasant reading experiences would turn a student off to the reading activity. Predictable consequences would be a child who hates reading and loses out on vast intellectual benefits and development. In addition, his reading failure would tax his self-confidence, and he could be branded with one of society's popular labels such as dyslexia. I considered Jenny's reading struggles in the context of performance expectations as well as grading and comparisons with other children. It seemed as if she faced a nasty dilemma: force herself to read alienating material, or disengage and then disappoint parents, teachers and self. What an impossible predicament for a young child. Once sunny and blue, the skies had turned dark and stormy for our happy little girl whose only offense had been to attend her friendly neighborhood school at the innocent age of six. It has occurred to me that the cause of America's illiteracy crisis has been discovered. It is the reading curriculum in our schools. Unfortunately, the damage to children appears to extend way beyond reading failure. One wonders if the hidden agenda in the readers has created our victim culture, a generation of withdrawn and resentful children, alienated from themselves, their parents, society, books and ideas. I was reminded of the plight of our neighbors. The father and mother were loving, dedicated parents. He was an accountant and she was a homemaker and community leader. They were nice people, and so were their children. The two teenagers were bright but got poor grades and hated school. They hung out with the crowd and participated in the kind of self-destructive behaviors that are commonplace today. I asked these young people why they would behave in ways which would cause pain for themselves or their loved ones. They smiled quizzically and professed not to know. Maybe the ideas that moved them truly were subconscious. We are all familiar with kids like this (Our own kids are kids like this, or they come too close for comfort). They spend a lot of time "doing nothing" with like-minded friends. Passive-aggressive with suppressed individuality, they all seem cut from the same mold. Self mutilation with tattoos and body armor is almost universal. Some of their groups are virtually masochistic cults. Sadism is the other side of the masochism coin. That so many of these dysfunctional teenagers come from loving homes and neat families is inexplicable and shocking, until you realize that they have all been tortured together in school since the first grade. They are a batch of little Manchurian Candidates with attitude, victims of the obscure behaviorism that I found, and that others have found before and since, in school readers. Barb and I had seen some perplexing changes in Jenny's reading since she started in first grade. For one thing, she had stopped reading her favorite books and stories at home. Before starting school, she had feasted on Grimm's Fairy Tales. Although she still begged us to read these to her, she now explained that she was not supposed to read them herself, according to her understanding from her teacher, because they contained big words and content in advance of her abilities. Barb and I, holding our tongues, exchanged tortured grimaces and cross-eyed glances. When reviewing the school readers, I had noticed an impoverished vocabulary, composed mostly of three and four letter words. I brought this up with the teacher. She explained that the readers were integrated into a district policy that no more than five hundred new words be introduced to students during any grade level. The idea was to protect children from the dizzying and confusing effects of an overabundance of words and ideas. I nodded as if I understood, but I didn't really get it. Barb and I had clearly used the wrong approach with Jenny. We had allowed her to read anything she wanted and had provided her with a flourishing home library. Furthermore, we had encouraged her to run around in the grassy meadows and on the sandy beaches. She must have collided with great numbers of unfamiliar words and ideas, as well as a perilous diversity of flowers and sea shells. It's a wonder she survived at all. We considered the various elements of Jenny's brief experience in first grade. She had a clueless teacher. She was regressing in her reading skills, vocabulary, and enthusiasm. She was being indoctrinated with character destroying qualities like passivity and group dependence. Her intellectual development was being stunted and she was being bombarded with a curriculum of parental alienation. Judging by her crying in the classroom, she was part of a captive audience being repeatedly exposed to painful stimuli. To put it plainly, she was the victim of ongoing torture and cruelty. Along with her classmates, she was becoming, as one of her school poems pointed out, "Small, small, small, just a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of it all." _____ In our state at that time, compulsory education began at the age of eight. Jenny was not obliged by law to attend school. With our various concerns, we pulled her out of school while we tried to figure out what to do. -- CyberChrist http://www.hackerjournal.org My brain is hung like a horse.

by **blanc** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 7:54 pm

schools are not such a good idea really are they?

by **professorpan** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 8:08 pm

There are bad school and bad teachers, and good schools and good teachers. I'm inclined to believe the author of that piece has an axe to grind. It's hard to take anecdotal stuff like that as a condemnation of schools in general, or the education system.

by **Col Quisp** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 8:38 pm

Based on my very limited experience with substitute teaching a class of 5th graders, I would have to say that the information in this story is accurate. The materials in my class were Mickey-Mouse, yet the kids strugged to get through them. I had to give them a math test, and they were allowed to raise their hands if they had a question. Every two seconds, a hand would pop up, and they pretty much asked me how to solve the question. These materials sure do the trick of dumbing down the populace. These kids were high-strung, could not pay attention or sit still, cried easily, did not listen or obey. I would have to disagree that the curriculum is creating robots since they paid no attention to me even when I bellowed at them. Or maybe it was just me! Is home-schooling any better? Glad I don't have to make those choices!

by **mother** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 9:52 pm

we had to take our little ones out of public school and home school. But we're relocating to an area with a wide variety of schools. Home schooling is good, but I wouldn't want to do it for the next 10 years. I'd lose my mind for sure. But the details in the article are certainly true, particularly in the awful reading material and the Pavlovian effect.

by **Avalon** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 10:09 pm

I guess it would be too much to ask this Eagle to provide verifiable information like the textbooks' titles and author,s and in which school system they were featured. Information on how textbooks are chosen by the district and state, and a description of how the parent Matt James spoke with the principal and Board of Ed and otherwise tried to engage the school system in a dialogue and work within the system. But no, fuck all the other kids, they were just going to save their little girl and not work for social change that would help other kids. I couldn't see this article listed on the two sites Charlotte Iserbyt linked. I wondered why it was bad that his sensitive daughter cried about the awful things in the stories she read, yet it was good that Charlotte Iserbyt cried sensitively about the bad things in his article. Classic Rense moment, when I tried to access <a href="http://www.deliberatedumbingdowbn.com">www.deliberatedumbingdowbn.com</a> [sic] to see the context this was coming out of. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol">

by **wintler** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 11:23 pm

I think calling it deliberate is a reach, without more evidence (and yes i'm aware of some of the evidence for same), but that mass education dumbs down AND mentally brutalises most if not all kids i don't doubt for a second. Conformity, popularity, heirarchy, these are the basics of most childrens education, for some decades past. I only made it thru school by discovering the power of a sharp tongue and that was at no trivial cost to my emotional literacy and intimacy. We send our only child to school to learn how to swim in the social sea, not to learn to read or to be inspired particularly - thats up to us (her parents & extended family). I simply couldn't trust the overworked, under-resourced, and poorly educated teachers to do the job. Putting aside the 3 r's, there's still lots of 'moulding' to be concerned about, and at the moment i'm trying to fight that by being very clear that there are school rules & school ways of thinking & talking, that my daughter can and maybe should ditch the moment she's off the grounds. Home schooling is incidentally fairly rare here in Aus. My kids' class incidentally has a number of recent arrivals from Somalia, at least one of whom is obviously acting out violence a 5y.old shouldn't know exists: and thats (not happy but) okay with me, so long as basic safety is guaranteed, it is handled well and not ignored or trvialised, which to the schools credit its not, and progress is made towards ending those behaviours. I consider that side of my daughters 'schooling' invaluable. i'm regularly revolted by two themes in too much kids media: -extremely stereotyped role models - girls are princesses, witches, or very occasionally superheroes. Nobody is themselves. -bad things happen and nothing can be done until a hero/special somebody/special something arrives I also have reservations about the coverage of fairies/elves etc, as they're either friendly and kind if 'real', or if 'imaginary' are only for silly little kids.

by **marykmusic** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 11:37 pm

We home-schooled our boys for 2 1/2 years, until moving here where there are numerous charter schools from which to choose. The youngest is in a Montessori, and the ninth-grader has only 5-hour days and credit for both his part-time job and his first college class. I think it worked out well. --MaryK

by **StarmanSkye** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 12:01 am

"I wondered why it was bad that his sensitive daughter cried about the awful things in the stories she read, yet it was good that Charlotte Iserbyt cried sensitively about the bad things in his article." Seriously? Perhaps you were subjected to the same intellect-numbing dumb-down curriculum in school as his daughter was. (Sorry, couldn't resist! <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D"> ) It would hardly be a surprise that someone so conditioned wouldn't know why the parent was upset, though. Critical thinking, even a modest facility for rigorous thinking, would not be something an illigitimate power-obsessed plutocracy would want the general population to be capable of. I can relate to this article's awful implication. My abusive, alcoholic step-mom who had some serious psychological issues, tried to discourage my academic and intellectual development by asking absurd questions about my primary-school reading, taking all the fun and excitement out of reading. Feeling demeaned and stupid by her interference, which was likley her intent, I stopped bring books home and my reading-skills progress seriously fell -- as then did the rest of my schoolwork (except for art -- which became my escape along with daydreaming). I didn't even bring homework-books home in the fear that my mean step-mom would hassle me with more idiotic questions, making me feel dumb. In some twisted way, I guess my step-mom intended I wouldn't be a better student or 'smarter' than my 9-mon. younger, 1-grade below-me step-brother (her natural son, who she doted on). This lasted until about the fifth-grade, when the national geo books I looked-at (the pictures of) in our library-cum-lunchroom during lunch, eventually picqued my curiousity and interest so much I began reading the captions. Eventually,the teacher called on me to 'read' out-loud during class. She was astounded at my evident reading-ability -- from learning to read on my own while all the teachers assumed I was in the bottom of the class because I was naturally 'slow'. That day, I was placed with the 'smart' kids. I was kind of surprised to learn I wasn't stupid after all. I began to read prolifically and my vocabulary jumped leaps and bounds -- and I never looked back. If it wasn't for the happy accident with National Geo magazines browsed during lunch, I might never have overcome the 'you are stupid' programming my step-mom tried to imprint on me. I've long believed the dumbing-down of our society is not just incidental, or the product of our media-culture emphasis on images and infotainment indulgence. It seems our public schools are largely designed to keep the majority of kids from achieving their individual potential -- after all, gotta have plenty of truck-divers and janitors, laborers and landscapers, assembly-line workers and mechanics and secretaries and miners, etc ... People to do the peon grunt-work, who are content with what they have and don't have any expectations, who don't have great dreams about what is possible or who are interested in history, social movements, philosophy, and political-economic ideas -- in short, the masses who help keep the wheels of society running but don't feel they have any aptitude or right to question what their 'leaders' and 'betters' tell them. Most all of my life I've been an ordinary blue-collar guy, true-'nuff I threw-off my imaginary shackles and traveled a lot from place to place to 'see the world' and rub-shoulders with the teeming masses of humanity, with a bedroll and at least a coupla books and notebooks and pens and sketchpads or a camera -- And I was always aware that a lot of the workingmen and women I met or worked with, who built houses and worked the steel mills and ran the shrimp boats and built the roads and like-that, had an unacknowledged bias against big-words and complex ideas, they had a kind of anti-intellectual snobbery, and so when I spoke using descriptive five-and-six-syllable words without thinking I could tell some were put-off by it, not actually resentful but mistrustful as if I was in the wrong 'crowd'. Just one small example of a cultivated attitude children 'learn' in school, there are so many indications that the mass-homogenization and group-conformity to mediocre expectations is a deliberate public-school agenda that helps keep the majority of people unimaginative and at a purposeful disadvantage. The article sure struck a chord, I've heard or read many people's own observations of their or their children's experience. I suspect the system is made that way on purpose, with research gathered by our 'intelligence' services and used to design curriculum, and teachers are selected who have a definite knack for not inspiring children to excell, etc. A lotta folks have seen they and their children are so much further ahead by home-schooling, with only 4 hours of daily classroom and exercises needed to keep up with what other kids struggle 8 to 10 hours a day on. 'Course, for a lot of people, that's not an option. A good additional reason for co-op communities however, with shared labours. Starman

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 12:47 am

See John Taylor Gatto's own book plus website and the documented hidden history of oligarchs like the Carnegies and Rockefellers designing a system to create worker drones and cannon fodder, not "UN loving commies." The history is now mirrored at <a href="http://thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm">thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm</a> which is probably why the disinfo version is now being spread online by Rense. <a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm">www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm</a> AGAINST SCHOOL How public education cripples our kids, and why By John Taylor Gatto <blockquote>Quote:<hr>John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill," which appeared in the September 2001 issue.<hr></blockquote> This Rense/Iserbyt/James version, which highlights 'alienation from parents,' is meant to steer us towards the wrong perpetrators and and even discredit this history altogether by associating it with Rense>Iserbyt>Schlafly>1950s red scare demagogues to HIDE the real history of public schooling as anti-populism documented by John Taylor Gatto, a NYCity and NYState Teacher of the Year who became a whistleblower on the mind control and abuse of students. They tried to scrub his employment records when he was on vacation.That's how 'dangerous' he is.. BIG CLUE- Can you hear the echo of the 2005 keyword pre-emption of Ward Churchill's 'little Eichmanns' phrase from back on 9/12/01 saved like a psy-ops treasure to be trumpeted for weeks by Fox and the CIA press specifically to mask the February 2005 release of declassified documents showing the CIA hired five of Adolph Eichmann's assistants after WWII? No idea who 'Matt James' is who supposedly wrote about his little Jenny being made into "the little engine that couldn't," a great phrase despite the misleading context. Jeff Rense is not a good source. He didn't even put the proper spelling of the IntentionallyDumbedDown.com website. How ironic. As for Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, she is part of the reich-wing John Birch-type movement that sees bad schooling as a liberal commie plot to destroy America and replace it with the UN, the regressive view of the New World Order. Look over the link sources on Rense's page and cringe. You'll think it is 1959 again. Please read the history revealed by John Taylor Gatto because it ties together lots of the topics Jeff writes about- <a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm">www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm</a> >snip< But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable." It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary." Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier: 1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. 2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. 3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one. 4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. 5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. 6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor. That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed. There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing. Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. >snip< more... The United States of Addicts and Children. yikes. It fits. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=hughmanateewins>Hugh Manatee Wins</A> at: 3/9/06 9:52 pm

by **havanagilla** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 3:47 am

This is precisely what is on my plate at the moment. I homeschooled so far, but cannot handle it anymore so i sent off my toddler to preschool, (also he is already under compulsory education, but thats a secondary consideration). This is a public preschool, namely, owned by the municipality. The kids are basically half Arabs, quarter Jews and another quarter - variety of christians (russians, Ethiopians and alien workers from thailand and what not). I like the multiculturalism which is very RARE in Israel and this is why I sent him to that class and not another. BUT, the problems start with the "system". The teacher uses classis control by fear and by pitting one or the group against the other to gain authority. my son claimed that she beat him twice, now I am sure she didn't slap him or spank but I trust him that she was aggresive/violent perhaps in pushing him. The materials...god help up ! In the main lobby of the entrance you have the "fascist corner", namely, a large photograph of Ariel Sharon (should now be replaced with Olmert), the Flag and bits of "how much we love our country and Prime MInsiter". Puke puke. Holidays - luckily my son is too young to understand the stories. the official language is Hebrew, and so the other languages are ignored ! (although kids will speak among themrselves arabic or russian or amhari accordingly), the mentality is - Hebrew ONLY. The kids need to "perform" and pass "tests" in reading, writing and math already at age 5 !! if a child has difficulties holding a pen, he is branded as havnig "motorical problems" and sent to therapy. Lots of psychological garbage. There is a "profile" of how a kid should be at any given MOMENT and if he or she isn't like that - they are branded somehow. I also resent the meticulous documentation that is starting to pile up in the "big brothers" archives. Every child is constantly assessed and evaluated and the records are stored somewhere along with his "personal file" until he graduates high school !!! (and then the army gets to lay its hands on it...to make the fullest exploit of the new recruit). the message is - you are a property of the state.

by **blanc** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 6:37 am

came at this from a slightly different angle, that of someone who has taught in a variety of institutions for some years, and came eventually to understand that the 'teaching problems' ( actually learning problems), were not intended to be solved. if a child can't do a task or understand a process or material, no one asks the most fundamental question - why? so, research which showed the relationship between nutrition and brain function is ignored as far as public education policy is concerned, (merely used as a trigger to get ambitious parents to cough up for supplements), basic health checks on eyesight and hearing and many more conditions which impinge on ability to learn don't get done - there is no research addressing the process of learning in the classroom or the influences of, for example, stress on the individual's capacities. 'discipline' is a bad joke, fads follow each other, but no-one looks constructively at the situations which cause the 'problem' ; still less how to solve them. as millions are poured into education, with ever more elaborate management structures weighing down on teaching staff and creaming off funds, its pretty clear that the agenda is not what they want you to think it is. so after years of tutting over bad anti social behaviour by recalcitrant kids, belatedly, i am kind of applauding their refusal to lie down and take it. they know its bollocks, and they are being done down. try a bit of substitute teaching for a quick revelation. meantime parents are focused (deliberately I would say) on the necessity of finding a good school for their child, of how to know good schools from bad, and the idea of inefficient, uncaring, inadequate or lazy teachers is fostered as a convenient scapegoat for the failure of governments to deliver what we want for our children.

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 7:00 am

In the 1960s the Black Panthers started providing free breakfasts to kids. Eventually the police and FBI started murdering the Panthers and framing them up for very long jail terms. That's food for thought.

by **NewKid** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 7:46 am

It's amazing isn't it? All this 'incompetence' in education, the Bush administration and stuff like 9-11, yet for all their incompetence, it's worked out quite nicely for them. I guess it's true what they say, it's better to be lucky than good!<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/roll.gif ALT=":rollin">

by **CyberChrist** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 12:20 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>There are bad school and bad teachers, and good schools and good teachers. I'm inclined to believe the author of that piece has an axe to grind. It's hard to take anecdotal stuff like that as a condemnation of schools in general, or the education system.<hr></blockquote> It didn't sound like an axe to grind as much as it sounded like the author had a bad experience with a school. I didn't see anything that condemned schools in general directly. That being said, just the fact that there are "bad teachers and bad schools" and that this writer's experience is not unique should tell people that they need to be wary of what school their children attend and what the curriculum is like. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the books used by some school districts that the writer is talking about are indeed written in such a way that they seem to harm individuality. If you have children at that age, read their books and see for yourself. These books mostly come from McMillan Press, and there are a lot more stories like this about their books and what they are teaching. -- CyberChrist http://www.hackerjournal.org My brain is hung like a horse.

Little Manchurian Candidates

Little Manchurian Candidates

education education education

Re: education education education

Fascinating info

fascinating info

Re: Fascinating info

deliberate?

Re: deliberate?

Re: Fascinating info

!!This is a disinfo hijacking of Gatto's History of School

Re: schooling

schooling

Re: relationship between nutrition and brain function

Re: relationship between nutrition and brain function

Re: education education education

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