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

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Weapons of Mass Instruction
Only 31 percent of college-educated Americans can fully
comprehend a newspaper story, down from 40 percent a decade
ago.
- National Commission on the Future
of Higher Education, August, 2006
35 percent of the young regret their university experience
and don't consider the time and money invested worth itj
more than half said they learned nothing of use.
- Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2006
A Moral Odor
At the age of sixteen, a blind French teenager named Jacques Lusseyran
became head of an underground resistance group of 600 during
WWII. Lusseyran arranged dynamiting, assassinations, and other violent
forms of sabotage to free his country from the Germans, a story
told in his autobiography, And Then There Was Light. In chapter four,
he talked about his early schooling, calling the classroom experience
a moral disaster:
... there is such a thing as moral odor and that was the case
at school. A group of human beings that stay in one room
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