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