john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction

WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
survive more than a year, the caste system that corrupts our schools is
partially to blame. Nobody ever bothers to ask the 100 to 150 teachers
who leave each year why they left. That's because everyone already
knows.
The Shadow Economy of Schools
Teachers with deals don't constitute the entirety of non-laboring
labor in schools, there's been such an inflation of management, both
visible and invisible, as to defy imagination. For instance, what do you
make of this: the student/teacher ratio in our school district is listed
in state accounts as 15:1, but everywhere the number of kids in a class
is 30 or more: Half of all teaching energy has been siphoned away into
administrative tasks in the shadow economy of front-office politics.
No healthy enterprise can afford this degree of deceit. It's the teachers
who don't get paid off with these non-teaching deals you should
be worrying about. They become bitter and cynical. They find ways
to get even, ways to cut back on their own production. You administrators
have created a catastrophe by paying off your favorites with
deals.
I can't escape the conclusion that we both are involved in a social
engineering project whose mission is to weaken children's minds and
give them bad characters - all concealed in the sanctimony we exude
on parents' night. I heard one principal (a decent man in his own estimation,
I'm sure), tell a large audience that the damage to these children
had already been done before they came to him in seventh grade,
and that his job was to relieve their pain and make them feel good in
the here and now because their limited futures were already predetermined.
Can you believe it! The shameless brass! I couldn't make that
up. Isn't it the function of morphine or crack cocaine to stupefy pain
Given a choice between those substances and school as an anodyne,
you'd have to be deranged to choose school.
Two district policies in particular have destroyed the capacity
for sustained thought among our kids. The first was the political