In light of the focus education has received on the blog this week, I was interested to find a new resource on the Web. It’s called the “Underground History of American Education“.
The book reaffirms several suspicions I’ve developed over the past twenty years:
- Public education’s purpose is not so much to educate, but to build a controllable population.
- Children thrive best when given real responsibility for educating themselves out of necessity, not when chained to a desk doing busy-work with no real repercussions.
- Parents are coerced to put their children into school. This has been mitigated somewhat over the past twenty years by the home-schooling revolution, but nevertheless you must school your child according to State standards or face jail time.
- Independent thinkers and skeptics are not well-tolerated in the byzantine bureaucracy that is the public school.
- US school systems are hopelessly anglo-centric, with only a polite nod to the rich history of Native Americans who were displaced by European immigrants or the other immigrant cultures… including Hispanic, which accounts for a huge minority of Americans.
- Modern school systems are a breeding ground for pathological behavior.
- Schools teach false dependency on arbitrary authority figures for actions which are normally an act of one’s own volition. Such as an outside authority being responsible for the timing of one’s toilet duties.
- Our schools end up teaching that self-esteem isn’t something you acquire for yourself; it is granted by authority figures or by one’s peers. This builds a lifetime dependency on other people for one’s own self-esteem.
On the plus side, the author has provided the entire text online if you’re a cheapskate like me and prefer not to pay for your non-fiction ๐ I’m only part-way through it, and other than a tendency for the author to see conspiracy where I see bureaucracy, it’s a reasonable read for a history book.
History of American Education
1-This statement,of public education’s purpose, sounds scary to me. The schools will never control the population as long as we have a free society. We can voice our disapprovals and we can offer more agreeable alternatives or options and we can VOTE!
2 & 3-What happens to children who don’t go to school or who drop out of school? Are they a burden to society or are they good law abiding citizens? Do they continue to study and learn all they can or do they become criminals? There is a good reason for the law that children must go to school. It is for their own good because without it they would be left without purpose or guidance if they are not taught that in their homes.
4-A person who thinks independently will do so regardless of circumstances. A person who habitually doubts, questions or suspends judgement will put people on the defensive unless he/she offers a better solution.
5-Children learn about as much history as they are willing to listen to and comprehend. My history teacher, in high school, was the football coach and taught boring lessons. If a child is truly interrested in history, there are libraries full of history books just waiting for the young scholar to check out.
6-Pathological behavior is bred by a SICK mind. Unless educators can read that sick mind, how can they stop their pathological behavior? The schools would have to lock up every boy or girl who showed early signs of wanting to kill or maim. We cannot put the blame on the schools. We are all responsible for the protection of our children! Last year my 15 year old grandson committed suicide. He was very depressed, for many different reasons, but the school had nothing to do with his decision to end his own life.
7-Children notoriously take advantage of tolet duty time. They will use this excuse to get out of class as long as they can get away with it.
8-Children are taught self esteem, stating the day they are born, by loving parents, family members and/or guardians. If they have low self esteem by the time they go to school it might be too late.
Observation, not proposal
Note that my statements above are observations, not proposals. I have no doubt some of them are scary… but they certainly seem true from what I can see.
We apparently have very different definitions of “free”. I maintain that we began losing our freedoms the moment we recognized corporations as “real persons” in the late 1800s. At that moment, corporations became super-citizens with enormously deep pockets to influence public policy.
Today, with campaign contributions forming de-facto legal lobby/bribery rings, no political candidate has a chance of winning an office without owing his position to the sponsorship of some corporation with an interest in increasing its own profits by using the money invested in its candidate.
We see the results of this legalized bribery all around us. The sheep-like indoctrination of the public school system lulls us into a sense of security while our rights are whittled away. I’ve talked about this before; I hate to quote so much of a previous entry, but I still agree with what I wrote:
“I am troubled because today, I cannot protest en masse with my fellow citizens within view of a seated US President. I will be removed to a “free speech zone”: a fenced, barricaded, razor-wired holding pen for those people who disagree with the President, often miles from the location where he is speaking. Those who support the President, however, may hold their support signs in full view of the cameras and our elected representative. I thought all the public property in the entire country was supposed to be a free speech zone.
“I am troubled because my country condones the use of torture. We obey the letter of our treaties by not torturing our citizens and visitors within our borders, but by shipping them to third-world countries which will torture them on our behalf. It is a most cruel and unusual punishment to be deported, beaten, and tortured for information without a trial.
“I am troubled because today, the average citizen cannot afford to run for high public office. Only the independently wealthy have much of a chance of succeeding; recent studies indicate that the average congressperson must have at least $2 million in cash to have a hope of winning a House seat. We seem to be turning into a country where only the wealthiest 2% of our population controls our legislative and executive branches. All men are not created equal, it seems…
“…I am most troubled because our soldiers, the bulwark of our successful sovereignty, are being used to defend our “freedom” abroad, while our legislators and executive branch seem hell-bent on limiting our “freedom” at home. Non-warranted “sneak and peek” searches. Unlimited government access to telephone records. Aforementioned “free-speech zones”. Refusal to sunset the PATRIOT act, which grants unprecedented autonomy to law enforcement.
“I can’t shake the feeling that we are being bilked in an enormous shell game. While we’re “watching the ball” on morality and traditional family, the hard-won rights fought for by our Founding Fathers are being repressed, little by little. Not enough to create a revolution or profound public resentment, but just enough at a time to get us used to the weight of the chains with which we will one day be shackled.
“The United States is a nation of contrasts and contradictions. Side-by-side on our one-dollar bill stands the National Seal, with the phrases “Annuit Cลptis” and “Novus Ordo Seclorum” proudly emblazoned thereon. “Our undertakings are favored in this new secular order”*. On the other side reads, “In God We Trust”.
“The freedom we fight for is, at its heart, the freedom to disagree. We disagree without fear of punishment. Without fear that our homes will be illegally searched and siezed. Without fear that our right to defend our selves will be stripped from us, or that our churches will be raided. We disagree with ourselves, all the way down to our currency.”
I apologize for the length of this post so far; thanks for sticking it out! Public education policy is a grave concern of ours, and we are involved locally with improving the education of our children.
By and large, they are law-abiding citizens, but high-school dropouts comprise the poorest segment of our society. I believe that changing our attitudes toward public education away from the diploma-mill mentality is the only way to address their unique needs.
Did they fail, or did “the system” fail them? I think we can reduce the numbers of dropouts by addressing their needs… and part of that is by improving the public-school systems to have real consequences and to be of real significance in life, more like the Japanese or German systems currently in use.
I understand many don’t agree with their disposition profiling techniques to determine higher education opportunities. One being bound for a trade school rather than college, however, is not an indication of one’s abilities, but one’s preferences. There’s an appeal process to allow moving between these categories, as well, and it’s used regularly by many people.
I call baloney ๐ I did not become an independent thinker until the age of twenty-five, when a succession of non-fiction reading opened my eyes to the possibility that there was much more truth out there than I had been taught. Our current “teach to the test” and “teach to the speed of the slowest child” mentality — largely a product of the ill-begotten “no child left behind” program — removes the child’s creative research from the equation, reducing his education to a mere matter of memorizing the “right answers”.
Blame the child — the victim — for poor eduction in certain subjects? I think that’s a bad idea. If we renew our focus on quality education and tailor programs to suit the needs of children, we would find them dramatically more receptive to ‘boring’ topics. Our country’s non-slave population was better-educated in 1830 than it is today. Something has fallen through, and I strongly suspect it is our lack of focus on quality public education and adequately compensated teachers.
I maintain that the sick, prison-like culture of late primary and early secondary education festers pathological behaviors. The most effective treatments for pathology involve both medication AND therapy, indicating this is both a biological predisposition and a result of environmental factors. Like alcoholism, if you have either one or the other, the undesirable behavior may not occur.
School culture among children closely resembles that of prison inmates. This is largely, IMHO, a result of our “mega-school” mentality, with enormous classes and huge facilities. Smaller schools — not just smaller class sizes — are part of the answer.
Have a close, personal relationship with a small number of students can help ameliorate this. It won’t solve the problem — I don’t think human brain pathology can be “solved”, only managed — but it could reduce the amount of students who graduate, or don’t graduate, as damaged goods.
True enough. But this type of bodily function regulation does yield a better worker-bee mentality, doesn’t it? Scheduled potty breaks in school, regimented behavior in a mass-production culture… these things seem to follow.
Seems awfully fatalistic. I’ve improved my own self-esteem as an adult by coming to recognize my innate worth without the approval of others, particularly authority figures. The carrot-and-stick methods used to encourage children in today’s public schools, on the other hand, encourage dependence on authority figures for self-esteem.
I think our kids can find a good balance earlier in life than I did through realistic goal-setting, avoidance of teaching impossible standards with accompanying guilt-inflicting mythologies, and a focus on the progress of individual children rather than passing standardized tests. Our kids spend more time away from us than with us each day, and the impact of their friends and teachers is far more profound than anything a parent can do after the age of 5.
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Matthew P. Barnson