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

The Camino de Santiago 97
spired to wean children away from their urgent need to be out and
about. The end result has been a nation of angry, frightened, uncompassionate
and incomplete boys and girls in place of men and women.
People sentenced to be incomplete, incompetent, and fearful will find
ways to take vengeance on their neighbors while they continue to die
by inches in front of an electronic screen. Restore what has been stolen
and the problems of child-development warned about by experts
will recede, as childhood itself vanishes into the sick Teutonic minds
which spawned it.
Since the advent of schoolrooms and electronic screens, many of
us never grow up. Too much of our precious trial and error period is
wasted sitting in the dark. Being a mature being means living with
a purpose, your own purpose: it's about welcoming responsibility as
the nourishment a big life needs; it's about behaving as a good citizen
- finding ways to add value to the community in which you live;
it's about wrestling with your weaknesses and developing heart, mind,
and spirit - none of them properties of the spectator crowd.
Hitching the body and mind to screens reduces the attention span
to quick takes arranged by strangers; it creates a craving for constant
stimulation which reality can't satisfy. Violence of one sort or another
is the easiest way to still the gnawing hunger for stimulation that the
undead feel. And that violence includes the violence of bizarre sex -
the most important psychological product vended on the Internet.
Russian emigre Pitirim Sorokin, founder of Harvard's sociology department,
identified cultures of violence, such as our own, with its insatiable
craving for war, as late stages of civilizations in terminal decline.
In all failing societies, respect for obligation and family declines
along with compassion for one's fellows - to be replaced by a preoccupation
with amusement, diversion, and predation. Despite a carefully
calculated propaganda barrage about steadily declining crime
rates in recent years, we have four times the rate of violent crime in
I999 than we did in I959. Four times the number of citizens in jail.
These remarkable increases in crime immediately followed the penetration
of television into our culture.