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  1. #1
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    The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America



    Dumbing Us Down:
    The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
    By John Taylor Gatto

    Reviewed by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

    No one in America today is better qualified to report on the true condition of our government education system than John Taylor Gatto, the now-famous educator who spent 26 years teaching in six different schools in New York City and quit because he could no longer take part in a system that destroys lives by destroying minds

    In 1990 the New York �Senate named Mr. Gatto New York City Teacher of the Year. The speech he gave at that occasion, �The Psychopathic School,� amounted to a devastating indictment of public education (reprinted in BEL, May 1991, under the title �Why Schools Don�t Educate�). In 1991 Mr. Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year, at which occasion he gave a speech, �The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,� so insightful of the wrong-headedness of public education that it will probably become a classic in educational literature

    These two remarkable speeches, plus several others, including one entitled �We Need Less School, Not More,� were published in book form last year. And what a powerful book it is, only 104 pages long, readable in one or two sittings. With Outcome-Based Education being imposed on schools across America, we will get much more school, not less, and the content of that schooling will produce far more confusion than we already have

    Gatto was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, an industrial river town forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. He writes: �It was a place where independence, toughness, and self-reliance were honored, a place where pride in ethnic and local culture was very intense. It was an altogether wonderful place to grow up, even to grow up poor.� Gatto�s grandfather was the town printer and for a time, the publisher of the town newspaper, The Daily Republican, a source of independent thinking in a stronghold of the Democratic party

    The move from Monongahela to Manhattan was quite a jolt for Gatto. The difference in society and values turned Gatto into an anthropologist and in the next twenty-six years he used his classes �as a laboratory where I could learn a broader range of what human possibility is�and also as a place where I could study what releases and what inhibits human power.

    Like so many university students, Gatto was taught by his professors that intelligence and talent were distributed throughout the population in bell curve predictability. But his experience as a teacher taught him differently. He writes:

    The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence�insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality�that I became confused. They didn�t do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself, was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children�s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think, and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

    Entire review here
    Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum Of Compulsory Schooling - Reviewed by Samuel L. Blumenfeld


    Is it possible that the nature of 'education' in the United States
    has been turned against real learning?

    Movies like "Idiocracy", a very funny movie by the way, would have
    you believe that it is genetics and a tainted gene pool that are
    responsible for an overall decline in intelligence:

    "Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a
    frightening rate. Some had high hopes that genetic engineering
    would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds
    and resources where focused on conquering hair loss..."

    However, juvenile comedies aside, authors like Charlotte Thomson
    Iserbyt and John Taylor Gatto have demonstrated with CLARITY that
    it is, in fact, the government education system itself that is
    responsible for churning out drooling automatons like it's the Ford
    Motor Company making cars...

    Video:

    Schools are prisons The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

    Goodman Green
    - Brasscheck

    P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
    videos with friends and colleagues.

    That's how we grow. Thanks.

  2. #2
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    We hear the politicians talking about the highly qualified immigrants that we nee to import throught he HB-1 VISA program. These people are a product of a different education system and do not have more inherent abilities than our citizen children. Our kids are being short changed by and education system that seems to have lost it's focus from education and has become a political wasteland for ambitious administrators. The children of illegals get a lot more attention and help than kids that are native speakers. JMO

  3. #3
    Senior Member oldguy's Avatar
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    Public schools are simply terrible while we have some good teachers the system is overwhelmed with liberal bureaucracy, schools are more of a baby sitting camp for parents both working and either too tired or unconcerned with what is happening in schools.

    Listening to 5-8 graders sounds like an ad for the democrats in congress they know correct jargon to use but have no history or math to back there points.

    Prior to retirement I worked in an company that hired high school grads and college students part time and full time, training was frightening to say the least each task had to be repeated over and over again daily, while they spoke well and basic writing skills were good over all level on understanding very simple tasks were beyond belief.

    I believe they simply have been thrown into a system that taught
    only social skills/self esteem but very little basics.

    The few exceptions I experienced were home schooled children who
    were more mature and willing to adapt and learn.

    I grew up with the WW2 generation we had vets(males)as teachers
    if we messed up there was little to support our "self esteem" simply when we failed there was no prize but you better improve next time,also parents and adults interacted with us daily and we spent less time with peers today I believe the youth with cells,laptops,computer games spend little time with adults.

    Perhaps the old ways had some merit, small schools, love of country,family,etc, etc. Ok I will stop my flag waving and take a nap.
    I'm old with many opinions few solutions.

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