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

David Sarnoff's Classroom 79
decision, cooked up at the Ford Foundation, as I recall, not to control
outrageous classroom behavior on the grounds that frustration
causes perpetrators to have low self-esteem. While this policy was
being imposed (and afterwards), the rhetoric of decent behavior was
maintained, as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. Tell me
how that was any different from Big Brother announcing the chocolate
ration was being raised, while it was being lowered The degree of
disrespect our nation has assigned its ordinary population wouldn't
be possible unless somewhere in the command centers it hadn't been
decided that common men and women should be stripped of any
power to rebel. And that they could be lied to without compunction,
because their dignity didn't count. Or their lives.
As these conditions for chaos were being imposed, a form of triage
was constructed wherein a few of the "best" classes (on the liberal
West Side, that means mostly white classes) were to be held to a traditional
standard. As fo~ the others, the mass of fairly well-behaved
kids, was mixed with an infusion of violent, restless, disruptive students
until only a primitive level of instruction was possible. In order
to free school administrators from the tiresome function of helping to
maintain order for the lumpen proletariat, classroom disruption was
now deemed, system-wide, a problem of bad teaching. In other words,
if you complained, or asked for help, you were treated with contempt
and your job was in jeopardy. Mirabile dictu! The burden of discipline
vanished as an administrative responsibility. And because reasonably
patient children become angry at a teacher's ineffectiveness in maintaining
order, many of the polite kids joined the disruptors, too. Does
that surprise you, Murray The cause and effect linkage, I mean.
Another destructive policy decision was the project to recruit disruptive
children from other school districts, to conceal the shrinking
enrollment in District Three - a student population decline caused
by the evil reputation District Three acquired from its first policy!
In 1984, after we fell to the lowest student enrollement of any district
in New York City (10,000), 3,000 half-crazed children were recruited.
It was like dumping the flotsam and jetsam of Cuban prisons