Book Review: Dumbing Us Down

Apologies to my one reader for my absence last week. The passage of Health Care disturbed me deeply, and I still cannot quite find the words to express my dismay at what is happening to the states and country.

However, I also read a book this week, and before you start asking questions, it was, thankfully, a small one. It's titled Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, written by a NYC public-school teacher John Taylor Gatto.

(Insert appropriate oath of horror and astonishment here - yes,  I do read).

If nothing else, this book should be a required read for all people interested in starting a Reformation or Revolution here in America in order to give our children a fighting chance at enjoying the fruits of their liberty and of this Land. It is a most enlightening exposé on the practices and motivations behind the general public school system that is terrorizing growing Americans.

I, thank God, did not go thru' the system while growing up due to the decisions of my Parents. There were many times, particularly while being a teenager, that I wished that I was able to be with those few friends that I had IN the local HS. However, after this, I fervently thank God Above that that never came to pass.

The book is essentially a selection of essays and speeches given by the Author. The first two chapters are perhaps the most vital, concerning the function of the public system of Education, and how it corrupts the very nature of Society. The later chapters are perhaps not as vital to the ideas, but they are valuable in their own right as being necessary expositions on the ideas set forward previously, and also showing that the monolith currently served obeisance is not neccessary, drawing on free-market and histroical examples.

The first two chapters is called The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher and The Psychopathic School, respectively. Chapter One deals with what Mr Gatto refers to as the National Curriculum, that you and I, as taxpayers, in effect promote.

First: Confusion- there is no natural progression from one thing to the next and all things are artificially segmented.
Second: Class Position - jealousy of higher classes and contempt of lower, a complete affront to even the egalitarian worldviews that this system cries that it is trumpeting
Third: Indifference
Fourth: Emotional Dependency - surrender a child's will to the designated Chain of Command, here, quite possibly, very similar to the one used by Jayne Cobb - "You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who's in ruttin' command here!"
Fith: Intellectual Dependency - do not do anything until instructed to do so, think only what told to think, etc.
Sixth: Provisional Self-Esteem -  the perpetuation of dissatisfaction, and the demolition of self-confidence.
Seventh: One Can't Hide - privacy is destroyed, the ability to learn from someone other than the designated authority is destroyed, &c.

The second chapter essentially deals with the complete and utter uselessness of the current education system, specifically delineating the difference between Schooling and Learning. While Learning may indeed take place while a person is in school, and while that is trumpeted as the basic and essential reason for public Schooling, that is not in evidence. Mr. Gatto defines schooling here as a moulding of character into a deformed shape, and gives eight specific examples, or symptoms, of what happens to people when they are schooled rather than educated. These symptoms are as follows: children are indifferent to the adult world, curiosity-less and attention-less (or functionally ADD), minimal understanding of past and future, compassionless, avoid intimacy of all sorts, materialistic, and lacking in intestinal (and other kinds of) fortitude.

While I will also readily point the fingers at the social and familial vacuum that people grow up in in these days, the notion that public schooling is in some parts directly (in some manner or another) responsible for these faults is one that worries me.

Well now do I hear the pleading of such organizations as the teacher's unions, the educational establishment, &c, for more funding in order to correct the slow dissolution of functional education in our nation's public schools. Of course, we all know that the government is the best possible organization in the entire world  to je put in charge of any and all facets of our life.

I suggest this book to any and all of you. Please, particularly if you intend on teaching, or if you have children soon to be schooled ... Read.

So how is this reformable? Only by its very destruction. You must call, you must write, you must genteelly kick in the doors of Congress, State Senates and Representatives, Governors, County Commissoners, &c, and demand that they give you choice  in your child's education. You must never cease in that demand. You must use that choice and send your children to private schools or school them in your home. You must convince them and those around you that Public Education as an institution is only an institution in the same way a mental hospital is an institution, and that to keep sending our very children to such a place is irresponsible in the least, and an act of such desperate laziness and corruption that deserves the most strident and insistent damnation.

And you must teach children that they are precious as jewels in your eyes. You must teach through your actions. If you truly care about your children, and about the future of your state, you must not ship them off to a factory of the mind. You must show them worth, and you can only do that if they are around you constantly.