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Old February 15th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default #1 Public Schooling Thread: Public Schooling: History, Aims, Global & Anti-White Agenda

Thread for getting you up to speed on what public schooling is really all about: turning free White men into ZOG slaves.

Authors to read are

Charlotte Iserbyt
John Taylor Gatto
Samuel Blumenfeld

Google these names and you'll find their books

Here, free and online, is Charlotte Iserbyt's "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America":

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
 
Old February 15th, 2008 #2
Alex Linder
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This simple ten-minute video will stand your hair on end, as Iserbyt describes how the nostrums and psych techniques of a jew named Benjamin Bloom are used to train idiot educations majors (who become public school teachers) to play on your child's natural sympathies in order to brainwash him into NWO-congenial dogmas.

 
Old February 24th, 2008 #3
Sword
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Smile Public Schooling: History and Aims

Assuming this brainwashing in public schools, high schools and universities has been going on for decades, now we know why so many white people will vote for Barack Obama. Now we know why so many whites will send money to Africa to help the little niglets there who will grow up to be our biological enemies.
One remedy is to form a European-American educational society then work to teach our children about European-American history and principles.
A positive teaching of European-American principles will counteract the Jew brainwashing that is now firmly entrenched.
 
Old March 4th, 2008 #4
Wagner
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Default Against School

Excellent article from John Taylor Gatto. His website is http://www.johntaylorgatto.com.
Be sure to read his Underground History of American Education.


AGAINST SCHOOL

How public education cripples
our kids, and why
By John Taylor Gatto


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 2003 issue.


I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. 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.

Tre 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. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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Old March 18th, 2008 #5
Alex Linder
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[History of federal involvement in K-12 funding]

10 Facts About K-12 Education Funding

1.

The U.S. Constitution leaves the responsibility for public K-12 education with the states.

The responsibility for K-12 education rests with the states under the Constitution. There is also a compelling national interest in the quality of the nation's public schools. Therefore, the federal government, through the legislative process, provides assistance to the states and schools in an effort to supplement, not supplant, state support. The primary source of federal K-12 support began in 1965 with the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
Annual Secondary Education Expenditures per Student

ESEA authorizes grants for elementary and secondary school programs for children of low-income families; school library resources, textbooks and other instructional materials; supplemental education centers and services; strengthening state education agencies; education research; and professional development for teachers.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is a reauthorization of ESEA. The law's express purposes are to raise achievement for all students and to close the achievement gap. This is done through accountability, research-based instruction, flexibility and options for parents, so that no child is left behind.
Top

2.

Total taxpayer investment in K-12 education in the United States for the 2004-05 school year is estimated to be $536 billion. [ * ]

Even in this current time of the war against terror, taxpayer investment in education exceeds that for national defense. In addition to the K-12 money mentioned above, taxpayers will spend an estimated $373 billion for higher education in the same school year. As depicted on the chart below, the United States is a world leader in education investment. However, nations that spend far less achieve higher levels of student performance.
Top

3.

States and localities are the primary sources of K-12 education funding and always have been.
Total U.S. Expenditures for Elementary and Secondary Education

In the 2004-05 school year, 83 cents out of every dollar spent on education is estimated to come from the state and local levels (45.6 percent from state funds and 37.1 percent from local governments). The federal government's share is 8.3 percent. The remaining 8.9 percent is from private sources, primarily for private schools. [ * * ] This division of support remains consistent with our nation's historic reliance on local control of schools.
Top

4.

The federal share of K-12 spending has risen very quickly, particularly in recent years.

In 1990-91, the federal share of total K-12 spending in the United States was just 5.7 percent. Since that time, it has risen by more than one-third and is now 8.3 percent of the total.
Top

5.

Total education funding has increased substantially in recent years at all levels of government, even when accounting for enrollment increases and inflation.
Total Expenditures per Pupil (for Fall Enrollment)

By the end of the 2004-05 school year, national K-12 education spending will have increased an estimated 105 percent since 1991-92; 58 percent since 1996-97; and 40 percent since 1998-99. On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02.

Importantly, the increase in funds has been linked to accountability for results, ensuring taxpayers get their money's worth.
Top

6.

Federal funding for two main federal K-12 education programs will have increased by $9.3 billion since 2001, under the president's proposed budget.

Under the president's proposed budget for fiscal year (FY) 2006, 65 percent of the U.S. Department of Education's elementary and secondary school funds would go to help schools with economically disadvantaged students (ESEA, Title I) and to support children with disabilities (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA], Part B, Grants to States). If the president's FY 2006 request is enacted, the increases in these programs over the past five years will have substantially exceeded any previous increases over a similar period since the programs were created.
Top

7.

Most federal funds are sent directly to states and local school districts for their use in schools.
Title I Grants for Disadvantaged Children

The president's FY 2006 budget would provide $37.6 billion for K-12 education. Of that amount, 95 percent would be distributed either directly to local districts or to schools and districts through their states. Individual schools would then use these funds for the purposes defined in the programs. Major programs include:

* ESEA, Title I: $13.3 billion
* IDEA, Part B, Grants to States: $11.1 billion
* Improving Teacher Quality: $2.9 billion
* 21st Century Community Learning Centers: $991.1 million
* English Language Learners: $675.8 million
* Impact Aid (schools impacted by military bases and other facilities): $1.2 billion
Top

8.

There are no unfunded federal education "mandates." Every federal education law is conditioned on a state or other grantee's decision to accept federal program funds.

Federal education program "requirements" are not unfunded mandates because the conditions in federal law apply only when a state (or other grantee) voluntarily chooses to accept federal funds. Any state that does not want to abide by a federal program's requirements can simply choose not to accept the federal funds associated with that program. While most states choose to accept and use federal program funds, in the past, a few states have forgone funds for various reasons.
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9.

The federal commitment to education can be found in the actual dollars earmarked for education.
Federal Spending Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Like all laws passed by Congress, many federal education statutes include limits on how much future Congresses can spend. These are called "authorization caps." Actual amounts spent on education are called "appropriated levels," and they represent the actual federal commitment to education. Authorization caps are occasionally claimed to be "promises" or "goals" for federal education spending. Failure to meet these levels is sometimes claimed to demonstrate that an "unfunded mandate" exists.

The claim is simply untrue. In the history of the United States, actual appropriations have rarely matched authorization levels. If this were the standard, nearly all federal programs supporting agriculture, health, safety, construction, job training and transportation would be below their congressional "goals."
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10.

K-12 education is funded at the federal level through a variety of laws and programs.
No Child Left Behind Funding: 2002-06

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) gives our schools and our country groundbreaking education reform based on stronger accountability for results, more flexibility for states and communities, an emphasis on proven education methods, and more options for parents. Passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Bush on Jan. 8, 2002, the law represents the most comprehensive revision of federal education programs since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. NCLB programs in the president's FY 2006 proposed budget include:
*

Title I, the largest federal K-12 program, would provide over $13 billion to local districts to improve the academic achievement of children in high-poverty schools.
*

Reading First would supply over $1.1 billion to states to promote the use of scientifically based research to provide high-quality reading instruction for grades K-3.
*

Improving Teacher Quality Grants would provide states with $2.9 billion for teacher professional development and training.
*

English Language Acquisition would provide $675.8 million to states to assist schools in improving the education of limited English-proficient children by teaching them English and helping them meet state academic standards.
*

Other NCLB programs include those to support charter schools; strengthen high school education; improve math and science education; support after-school learning programs and assist American Indian, Alaska Native and migrant students.
Federal Grants to States for Special Education *

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) assists states and local schools in educating children with disabilities. Grants to States under Part B—the second largest federal K-12 program—would provide over $11 billion to states and local schools to assist their efforts.

The Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), passed in 2002, created the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. The law requires more rigorous standards for the conduct and evaluation of education research. NCLB requires that federal funds support educational activities that are backed by scientifically based research. Through sustained programs of research, evaluation and data collection, IES provides evidence of what works to solve the problems and challenges faced by schools and learners.

http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html
 
Old March 19th, 2008 #6
Alex Linder
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'To Train School Children in ... Loyalty to the State'

by Vin Suprynowicz

Don't you love it when a member of the ruling class slips up and admits to the peasants what they're really up to?

For years, I've called for the complete shutdown of America's massive archipelago of mandatory government youth propaganda camps. The defenders of this Largest Jobs Program in History shriek and bellow that I must be "against education," which is sort of like charging those who opposed slave galleys with being against ocean navigation.

Read de Tocqueville for his amazement at the high level of literacy – including an ability to discuss complex political issues – found among American workingmen of the 1830s – 20 years before Dewey and Mann launched today's government-run youth camps on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in 1852.

The New York Times reported Feb. 27 that fewer than half of American teenagers know when the Civil War was fought, and one in four believe Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750. About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany's chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him in a multiple-choice test as a munitions maker or premier of Austria.

Why is anyone surprised? The academic curriculum is the "cover," the "front." The real goal is not to ensure education, but rather to ensure against successive generations developing a cohesive philosophy of self-sufficiency, a code of ethics appropriate to a free people living under a government of limited powers. The goal is to make sure successive generations are powerless to muster the historical and economic context, logic and critical thinking skills necessary to see through the latest scheme to seize yet more of our wealth and use the loot to hire more bureaucrats to regulate yet another portion of our lives, our industry, our commerce.

California's 2nd District Court of Appeal on Feb. 28 declared the parents of most of that state's 166,000 home-schooled children to be outlaws, ruling the law requires parents to send their children to full-time state-certified public or private schools or else have them taught at home by "credentialed" tutors – which most home-school parents, presumably, aren't.

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling, which makes it clear those parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply.

And did Judge Croskey and his black-robed ruling-class pals say this was because the home-schoolers weren't doing as well at teaching reading, writing and 'rithmetic?

Of course not. They couldn't say that, because tests consistently shows home-school kids, taught by parents without state "certificates" or licenses, score 30 to 37 percentile points higher than their public school peers across all subjects.

So why ban home-schooling, if the academic results are far better?

Judge Croskey obligingly explained: "A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."

Imagine that. "Loyalty to the state." Almost as if what they're running are, I don't know ... mandatory government youth propaganda camps, or something.

K.G. writes in: "Dear Mr Suprynowicz, I wasn't always a homeschooler. I stumbled upon J.T. Gatto while researching school reform after dealing with my local school district and getting nowhere but Delphi'd and a SLAPP letter.

"I read 'Underground History' – in fact, I was unable to put it down. It explained HOW IT HAS BEEN DONE, how Americans have been turned into stupid, apathetic, self-absorbed, toadying sheep. ... At this stage of the game the social engineers no longer even pretend to educate. They 'socialize', they 'mold minds', they decide who will go to college and 'lead' and who will dig ditches for the local business-government or the national corporate state.

"After finishing that book I had to get my kids out, pronto. I regret that they spent their most formative years in the govschool gulag learning to take orders and stand in line, raising their hands to go to the toilet. In fact, when I told my youngest daughter, starting '3rd grade', that we would be homeschooling, she asked me if she would be allowed to go to the toilet whenever she wanted. I almost cried. ..."

A local attorney writes in: "Mr. Suprynowicz – Government schools are liberal indoctrination camps, nothing more. My son was shown 'An Inconvenient Truth' during 4th grade and now berates my wife for using plastic bags. He is a GATE student (gifted) but curiously received a 'C' after he disagreed with his teacher that global warming was caused by human activity. He said no humans were around when the last ice age melted and for that he was punished.

"His teacher went on to teach the class that President Bush used cocaine and that the moon landing was staged. She had white students apologize to black students for slavery and (said) that taxpayers should pay reparations because slavery destroyed the black family. He was also taught that a perfect electric car was made many years ago but the oil companies killed those responsible. ...

"My cousin home schools his children. His son who is 15 ... is taking college level classes through independent study. He is showing an affinity for geometry and physics. ... He is reading books about maritime history ... non-stop even though his reading 'level' is below what some standardized test says it should be.

"When he attended a public school in Belmont, Calif., he was put in special classes for learning disabled children. No doubt his teachers had high hopes he would become a dishwasher. ..."

J.B. writes in from upstate New York that John Taylor Gatto's "book, Dumbing Us Down was instrumental in helping me make my decision to homeschool my two children, and we are in our fourth year of doing so. ...

"Anyway, just wanted to take a moment to thank you for helping to get the word out on the largest crime ever perpetrated on the human race: the locking away and dumbing down of our beautiful, vibrant, smart, loving children.

"I dream of a day when the parents rise up, en masse, and scream for their release!"

March 19, 2008

Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/suprynowi...ynowicz78.html
 
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