July 15, 2004

• I thought this one would prompt some discussion.
  

  Education: I’m not sure that we are capable of nationally ensuring equal and quality education. Consider bumping this down to state level and reducing taxes so that the states can cover it.

  Inktea responds:

  Your method ensures states like South Dakota will not be able to afford to take care of its social programs. Unfortunately, unequal distribution of wealth and resources across the nation means that the money in places like South Dakota would be *very tight*. Forget education- we’re already paying our high school teachers the least in the country- if we get less money from the federal government, AND funding to other social programs is cut, you can bet your aunt fanny that we won’t be able to make ends meet almost anywhere. Families that can afford to would end up moving to other states, that could afford to appropriately fund a child’s education. Places like South Dakota would end up being wastelands of impoverished people who cannot afford to leave for anywhere else.

  Are you sure you want to cut federal funding for social programs?

  My point of view are based on three opinions. I believe that handing all the cash up to the feds to be redistributed back down ends up with a lot of it disappearing to pork barrel projects and questionable priorities (defense budget vs education budget?) Second, I believe the national level is too large to provide a truly competent educational system. Finally, I believe the educational system is “fundamentally flawed”.

  I do belive that our education programs are definitely under funded. Teachers have one of the most critical jobs in our society and are not given enough respect or compensation. However, I have a number of problems with the system as it is. I think our current system protects incompetent teachers and stifles the creativity and initiative of the competent ones. I believe that the basic purpose of our educational system is contrary to the intellectual growth of our students. I believe we need to change the mandate, fund the teachers, and demand results.

  As to funding amounts…

  Unfortunately, I don’t have the numbers available, but I would imagine that if we significantly decreased (or eliminated) the federal tax burden, even states like South Dakota would have enough to fund their social programs. Just decreasing our defense budget to 25% of its current levels should free up an enormous amount of resources. In states with less resources, one would expect living expenses to be lower, so a somewhat lower level of monetary compensation should afford a similar lifestyle to higher pay in a higher expense region. Does having less money lead to a lesser society if existing in that society requires less money?

  Out of curiosity – how much of a district’s budget comes from : Local Sources, State Sources, and Federal Sources? If anyone has those numbers, please post them.

  With federal funding comes federal oversight and federal dictates as to curriculum and mandate – a bureaucratic monopoly that seems to put us on the fast track to low level mediocrity. By at least pulling it back to a state level, one hopes for more accountability and more ability for communities to have an impact on the decisions that are made regarding their educational programs.

  This does mean that some states will choose different approaches. One may ensure that all educators have at least a masters degree, set small class sizes, and demand measurable results. Another may use vouchers and privatization to attempt to gain the advantages of a competitive system.

  Each state will have the right to set their own priorities and their own funding. By having different areas able to try different approaches, we will have more experimentation and hopefully states will cue off each other as to what works and what doesn’t.

  In my opinion, our nation is too large for homogenization to make sense or work. Many of our states are the size of entire European nations, and should have enough of a broad base to support their basic needs. Large may allow for some types of efficiency, but it is also typically less innovative, and it is almost always of lower quality.

  As to the current system being broken…

  In many ways, those who had access to education when it was provided completely by the community ended up with far better educations than students today do. All one has to do is read typical literature or newspapers from earlier eras to realize that the literacy levels were much higher.

  The problem was, not everyone had access to that education.

  The only role the federal government should have is ensure that human rights are not being violated by having access to education be discriminatory – your race or gender should have no impact on what level of education you receive.

  One thing to consider about the current public education system is that it (and its priorities) were pushed by the industrialists in the early 1900s like Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan. It’s purpose is not to advance the students, but to ensure they have the ability to be good automons in an industrial society. These are the priorities instilled in our current system, and this system must be torn down.

  I think it should be clear that I do not accuse teachers (as a whole) – a number of my family and friends are teachers, and they all have or had some idealism towards their career (the same can not be said about some of those who I tutored during college). However, no matter how idealistic, those who give great things to their students often do it in spite of the education system. It is bureaucrats, (some) administrators, and politicians that I blame.

  At the end of the post, I’m attaching a longish article that I found worth reading.

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  Ok! What the hell is up with this?

  Basic story – U.S. Congressman and former Governor from South Dakota blows a stop sign and wipes out a motorcyclist. He serves 100 days in jail for manslaughter and presumably needs to pay some hefty civil damages because he killed a guy.

  Well, since he was a Congressman in the state for various appointments and appearances, they say that he isn’t responsible for the civil damages – his employer (the US) is.

  So this guy blows a stop sign, kills a guy, but instead of being personally responsible for his actions, we are since he was in his state on official business.

  *grrr*

  I don’t actually have a problem with this guy only serving 100 days in jail, but I do have a problem with him living any richer than your average college student until he has paid full compensation for his victim’s death. (Whatever full compensation might be considered to be…)

  ---

  I read this today. I’ve heard it before, but I liked it.
  

  A man said to the universe:
  “Sir I exist!”
  “However,” replied the universe,
  “The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation.”
  Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900)

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  Here’s an article I found somewhere, a while back. It is a bit heavy on the conspiracy theory for my taste, but is worth the read:
  

  Good Reasons to DROP OUT OF SCHOOL and DROP OUT OF COLLEGE

  John Taylor Gatto climaxed his 33 year teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001) The following was culled from his most recent work.

  Perhaps the greatest of school’s illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families — to level the playing field, so to speak. Let’s see what’s really behind these illusions:

  THE MAKERS OF MODERN SCHOOLING

  The real makers of modern schooling weren’t at all who we think.
  Not Cotton Mather
  or Horace Mann
  or John Dewey.

  The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:
  Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron.
  John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil.
  Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty.
  and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance.

  Rich white men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire “social efficiency” movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.

  THE BUSINESS OF SCHOOLING & THE FOURTH PURPOSE

  If modern schooling has a “Fourth Purpose,” there must be an earlier three. Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes:

  1. To make good people
  2. To make good citizens
  3. And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum.

  The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a “fourth” purpose.

  The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.

  We should reveal the mechanism of mind control training, habits, and attitudes.

  Children were literally trained in bad habits and bad attitudes! Teachers and principals, “scientifically” certified in teachers college practices, were made unaware of the invisible curriculum they really taught.

  The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

  THE BUSINESS OF SCHOOLING

  Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren’t let in on this plan; they didn’t need to be. If they didn’t conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn’t last long.

  In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.

  These processes didn’t advance evenly. Some localities resisted more than others, some decades were more propitious for the plan than others. Especially during and just after national emergencies like WWI, the Depression, WWII, and the Sputnik crisis, the scheme rocketed forward; in quieter moments it was becalmed or even forced to give up some ground.

  But even in moments of greatest resistance, the institutions controlling the fourth purpose — great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism — increasingly centralized in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and out wait the competition.

  The prize was of inestimable value — control of the minds of the young.

  SCHOOL BECOMES A DANGEROUS PLACE

  After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called “The Workplace,” even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

  In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

  This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.

  Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling.

  Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well.

  What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!

  Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best “police” to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.

  SCHOOL BECOMES AN ARENA OF MEANINGLESS PRESSURE

  As the twentieth century progressed, and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral training centers, laboratories of experimentation in the interests of corporations and the government. The original model for this development had been Prussian Germany, but few remembered.

  School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent “standardized” exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.

  For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley and George W. Bush, two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States — with a mediocre 550. If you can become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?

  Perhaps they sort out good scientists from bad? If so, how is it that both the scientists principally involved in the Human Genome Project have strange scholarly backgrounds to say the least!

  Francis S. Collins, the head of the public portion, was home schooled, and never followed any type of formal curriculum.

  Craig Venter was a very bad boy in high school, a surfing bum who nearly flunked out, and he didn’t go to college after graduation, but into the U.S. Army as an enlisted man before being shipped off to Vietnam!

  SCHOOL AS A PLACE OF BEWILDERMENT AND BOREDOM

  The new purpose of schooling — to serve business and government — could only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another.

  Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.

  www.johntaylorgatto.com/

  add your own comments …

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  Follow up commentary
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  Subject: Interesting

  Loved this article. The whole public education system needs to be revamped. Interestingly enough, you know who often ends up being the most “successful” in life? Not the stars of the school: the valedictorians or the homecoming queens. But the “weirdos” and “freaks” who didn’t fit in, yet were very bright. That’s because they didn’t feel the need to conform and didn’t acquiesce to the groupthink. (I define successful as happy, satisfied, living…not existing.)

  For me, school was almost 20 years ago, now. I don’t know what it’s like for kids today because the media is far more pervasive.

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  Subject: Quotes to Contemplate

  Compulsory schooling is undoubtedly the enemy – no matter WHAT your goals – even being a capitalist pig – drop out! Bill Gates fled his first year of college. Einstein was a high school drop out. The list is long. Today it’s worse than things were 20 years ago – the corporate brainwashing is more shameless and open. Prussia invented compulsory schooling in order to make better soldiers – and the similarities between boot camp and school are striking. The U.S. started up compulsory schooling when the factory owners had a VERY difficult time getting independent and educated people to want to work in a factory all day. the solution: grow em dumber. Here’s some quotes to contemplate:

  “Public school – where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.”
  – Emma Goldman

  “Education is very important. That’s why I never let schooling get in the way of mine.”
  – Mark Twain

  “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”
  – Bertrand Russell

  “There is, on the whole, nothing on Earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.”
  – George Bernard Shaw

  “Now they’re talking about making kids wear uniforms in school. This is pretty stupid. Don’t these schools do enough damage making these kids think alike, now they want them to look alike too?”
  – George Carlin

  “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
  – Mark Twain

  “What’s the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.”
  – Bertrand Russell

  “Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see; ‘We are the Proud Parents of a Child who has resisted his teacher’s attempts to bend him to the will of his corporate masters’.”
  – George Carlin

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  And More:

  “School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity.” –Vincent Youmans, world-famous American physician and academic (1867)

  The creation of the compulsory public schooling system was ordered by “certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process.” –James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953 (1949)

  “We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.” –Rockefeller’s General Education Board (1906)

  “[Education is] a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character.” – The Education Department’s report “Designing Education for the Future” (1968)

  And, as my dad used to say, “High School is just a Minimum Security Containment Facility.” – and I was in a “good” school system.

  • 2:17 pm
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