homeschooling

From John Taylor Gatto

Author of “Dumbing Us Down” and “The Underground History of Education”

“Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln?

Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.

In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people.

2) To make good citizens.

3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them.

But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

“to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.”

From Against School

“I wish my fellow citizens were better educated about the above, but alas, the government controls over 90% of education, and tends not to reveal its own faults. In fact, public schools don’t even distinguish between the concepts of “nation” and “national government”, so most Americans don’t even know that they are distinct. We are taught to think of the federal government as “the nation”. Only philosophers know that the nation is all of its citizens, not just a ruling hierarchy (if you know the difference, then you are a philosopher).

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of public education is that it conditions future generations to support central control, thereby perpetuating authoritarianism. Merely by immersing children in a government environment from an early age, especially one that dominates their parents even when parents are idols to their kids, we impress young minds with an unhealthy, unconscious sense of government eminence that can last well into adulthood. Therefore, government run schools are inherently antithetical to liberty. I dare say that if there had been examples of public schools back when the founders wrote the bill of rights, we would have a separation of school and state as surely as we have a separation of church and state.

The powers that be do not want to raise critical thinkers; they want to groom complacent, loyal subjects who will fit like cogs in an industrial machine or march off to war when summoned (while politicians’ own children are groomed for leadership in private schools). Every government school system in the world has encouraged unthinking loyalty to that government. The totalitarian Nazis and Soviets are only the unvarnished right and left extremes.”

From Public Propaganda

Read Jennie Chancey’s review of John Taylor Gatto’s “The Underground History of American Education” for a closer look at the topic of what’s going on in the public school system.

OK…I was going to wait on this one, but I can’t. I’m sure I’ll hardly sleep tonight.

What I’m about to tell you I didn’t even hear of until last night. But I am SHOCKED after what I have confirmed. I think you will be too. (BTW, there are plenty of other documents detailing this subject I can post if you’d like.)

The reason it can’t wait, is because this sums up the whole matter…

AGENDA 21.

Heard of it? You’ll never forget it. This is an overview. Be sure to listen all the way…after about half way through, there are some specific references to the role government schools are playing.

Here’s one quote:

“People have asked me, ‘How do they expect to do this and make it last?

The answer is that you steal a generation of children, and indoctrinate them so that they accept these ideas and then they become global citizens in the coming global village.”