There is a great book called Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen,
a history teacher at college level. It's one of my favorite books. It's
the story of how history has been re-written for US high-schools.
Essentially all of history has been re-written as if by Disney. The
depth of the fraud is stunning, but also one that not many know about.
Loewen is clear that any college teacher who deals with students fresh
from high-school is profoundly aware of the problem. But nobody else
is.
And that's the problem. Nowhere in the book does Loewen mention a
Crisis in Physics. And that's my point. Because most of us work in our
area of expertise we have been divided and conquered: we see the Crisis
in Physics but there is little or no recognition that the problem is
NOT local; it's systemic.
What is happening to Physics is happening in all education, and to life
in general in the US, and it's happening by design. And the beauty of
it all is that a person who specializes in one subject will be
completely unaware of that design.
John Taylor Gatto is probably the leading authority on US education
system; he was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times
and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. He made headlines
that year for pointing to studies that showed that US students
habitually claimed that they were superior students in subjects that
they were in fact INferior in ... or failing ... even as a Japanese or
Chinese student would claim to be "average" when, in fact, they were
the best in the world.
Somehow, even at the time, this news seemed unsurprising to me because
the attitude permeates American culture.
John Taylor Gatto's book: The Underground History of American
Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern
Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001). Gatto's Website, now
contains the entire book online for free.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Nonetheless, any investigation that is limited to the crisis in physics
will never get to the root causes because the focus is too narrow and
the Big Picture is avoided. And, unfortunately, when you get right down
to it, the problems of the education system are just symptoms of a
larger problem.
__________
ARTICLE
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11693.htm
EXCERPTS:
How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way
it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row
announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded
over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who
designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system
in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.
Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and
hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down.
In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about
the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that
was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to
comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The
committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the
principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among
the laboring classes."
By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new
form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The
famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897: "Every
teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the
maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right
social growth."
In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly
- the future Dean of Education at Stanford-wrote that schools should be
factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed
into finished products ... manufactured like nails, and the
specifications for manufacturing will come from government and
industry."
The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board-which funded the
creation of numerous public schools-issued a statement which read in
part:
"In our dreams ... people yield themselves with perfect docility to
our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual
and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by
tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive
folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children
into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to
raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters.
We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor
lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have
ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple ... we
will organize children ... and teach them to do in a perfect way the
things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H.
Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government
schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly
wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by
teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think
for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate
articulately. We were to become good worker-drones.
Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001: "I once consulted
with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with
oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't
have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman,
agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state
conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world...that
the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or
they will lose their jobs in the real world."
The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent
book Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society
(New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
First published at the Memory Hole. The Educational System Was Designed
to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm
___________________
ANOTHER ARTICLE
TIMSS Homepage
http://timss.bc.edu.
...............................
Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1995)
http://www.wmich.edu/cpmp/parentsupport/timss.html
TIMSS collected data from a half-million students from 42 nations in
1995-96. Students were grouped at three levels, Grade 4, Grade 8, and
Grade 12
At grade 4, U.S. students scored above average,
By grade 8, they scored below the average, and
By 12th grade, the situation was even worse.
* "The 8th-grade mathematics videotape classroom study conducted in the
United States, Germany, and Japan found American and German lessons,
unlike Japanese lessons, focus primarily on the acquisition and
application of skills rather than problem solving and thinking.
* While 62 percent of Japanese and 21 percent of German 8th-grade
mathematics lessons included deductive reasoning, no American lessons
did.
* Television: Students in other countries watch just as much television
as our students
* Most U.S. teachers spend their class time telling students how to do
something, and students follow their lead. This results in students
having a very passive view of learning . . .
___________________
GETTING CLOSER TO THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM
Since the 1970s this Dumbing Down process has been aided by economists
like Edward Luttwak, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in Washington DC, who wrote "Turbo-capitalism :
winners and losers in the global economy" (HarperCollins, c1999).
I don't have websites or a lot of quotes because I borrowed the book
from the library but Luttwak's contempt for the working class, which
makes up 80% of the US population, is palpable. If you have noticed, he
mentions "losers" in his title and sure enough he devotes some time to
defining just who they are. If you think he's talking about welfare
mothers and the homeless, guess again: Teachers are losers. Not just
teachers but College Teachers.
Luttwak's "winners" are the executives like Ken Lay, boardroom
sycophants and Wall Street player who make vast fortunes in
unproductive work ... and of course economists who help by finding ever
more clever ways to overcharge customers and underpay workers, steal
pension funds and reduce taxes on the rich. So it should come as no
surprise that his "Super-winners" are Bill Gates and currency
speculator George Soros.
For years I have tried to write a review of this book and failed
because on virtually every page there is a new distortion, a new fraud,
a total lack of democratic values or mutual respect, so that I lose
focus with hundreds of major points, because it is clear that this is
the kind of thinking that is behind the money that runs the United
States.
For a single example, writing a glowing report on the wonderful
"Calvinist" state of Idaho, he says "Prisons are expensive, but while
total spending for the poor amounted to some $15 million in 1997, $200
million were found in the state budget to build a new prison -- to be
privately managed by a for-profit contractor, of course."
Amazing. If I wanted to write a stinging critique of the Idaho
legislature I could not have chosen better wording . . . but here is
Luttwak using the same words to praise them.
Standard neocon logic: Endless welfare for the rich zero for the poor.
It's always easy to find money when its going to family and friends.
And when he gets into the details -- that we are talking 44 month
average jail time for check bouncers and driving without a license and
primarily victimless crimes, then Ayn Rand comes to mind, "--when you
see that ... your laws don't protect you against them, but protect
them against you --you may know that your society is doomed."
If you buy the book - do Luttwak a disfavor: BUY IT USED
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/
What you will not find in the book is an explanation, or genuine
enduring concern about what is happening in the US and around the
world: the intentional destruction of the middle class, because it is
designed by people like Luttwak himself. The saying "a rising tide
raises all boats" is not just simply untrue; it's an outright lie.
Wages for the 80% of the population that work for a living have not
risen for 40 YEARS. The only people whose income has risen during that
time are corporate executives.
I suppose Aubrey will say that "we know all this," which only makes me
more curious; why then does it not enter into the discussions?
Walt
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