| Abolish government education
By Charley Reese
Commentary
Published in The Orlando Sentinel on November 02, 2000
I'm not kidding when I say government education should be abolished.
Until we can accomplish that, we need to sabotage it every chance we
get.
Here is an excerpt from a speech by John
Taylor Gatto, former New York state teacher of the year and author
of Dumbing Us Down. He gave the speech to a Vermont home-schooling
conference.
"Using schools as the principal forge, the building blocks for a
self-perpetuating ruling dynasty organized on scientific principles
moved into place during the first five decades of the 20th century.
Obstacles like religion, tradition, family, the natural rights
guaranteed by our founding documents were steadily beaten back. Schools
slowly became, after World War I, a huge reconstruction project
conducted with the enthusiasm of an evangelical religion. The
traditional God was banished entirely before 1950 to be replaced by
psychological missionaries in a social-work priesthood. Public school
was transmuted into a social laboratory without public knowledge or
public consent. Think of what happened as a second American Revolution,
striking down those founding documents which granted sovereignty to
ordinary people. School was a lie from the beginning and continues to be
a lie. Our profitable system demands radically incomplete customers and
workers to make it go. Educated people are its enemies, so is any
nonpragmatic morality."
I urge you to download a copy of this speech at Richard
Webb's fine web site. His [Gatto's] history of the
machinations going on behind the scenes of government education is real
revelation.
Bet you've never heard of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,
Designing Education for the Future, and Behavioral Teacher Educational
Project, which, he says, are the basis of a covert revamping of teacher
training in the United States between 1967 and 1974.
Bet you didn't know that the basic document on which
school-to-work schemes are based was a translation of Russian documents
published in Moscow in 1986 and designed specifically to make sure that
there would be no entrepreneurial work done.
One of the points of Gatto's speeches and books is that forced
government education is designed to serve the government and the ruling
class that controls the government--not the students or their parents.
Another point is that the process itself produces negative consequences
in the child. As he puts it, "it takes about three years to break a
child."
After they're broken, just as in military training, they can be
reconstructed to fit the model.
Gatto also warns that government educators are consumed by the
problem of home-schooling and are trying to figure out ways to bring it
under state regulation and control. One plan under discussion is to give
parents vouchers that will gradually bring government educators control.
That's why I've always opposed vouchers. Any private school or
home-schooling parent who accepts government money is accepting
government control. My God, isn't it obvious that the federal government
has expanded its jurisdiction by bribes -- and that, in each and every
case, federal aid comes with federal control?
We will never maintain a free society by turning our children over to
"change agents" (the new jargon for teachers) who don't even
realize that what they were taught in universities has nothing to do
with education.
Some of that stuff he quotes from these documents seems straight out
of George Orwell, including the mass experiments on children with
psychological drugs, such as Ritalin.
Remember, not much happens by accident
N.B. Items in italics are changes by Jacq'
|
