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

100 WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
by compulsion begins to smell. That is literally the case, and
with children it happens even faster. Just think how much
suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy
and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by boys
between the ages of ten and fourteen ...
Lusseyran was able to murder large numbers of men just a few months
after he left school "where the world of reality with all its real moral
questions was entirely lacking. " We become what we behold. It's
something to remember, Columbine.
School As A Weapon
Most historical accounts of schooling are so negative you have to wonder
how this exercise of pedagogy ever passed the test of time with its
original parts nearly unchanged. It must yield some benefits, but what
those are and for whom isn't so clear.
It seems obvious that school weakens family and indeed all relationships,
but perhaps some valuable trade-off occurs which, on balance,
rewards people so radically disconnected from one another and
from themselves. School elevates winning so far above its ostensible
goal of learning that periodically public scandals occur when investigation
reveals that even elite students know very little. A century
of lending our children to perfect strangers from an early age - to
be instructed in what we aren't quite sure - has made an important
statement about modern culture which deserves to be mused upon.
One famous ode of Horace contemplates the torments of schooling.
Mosaics at Pompeii illustrate painful episodes of school discipline.
Washington Irving's story of the headless horseman celebrates
turning the tables big-time on an insufferable schoolmaster. The immortal
WWI era song, "Schooldays, schooldays, dear old golden rule
days;' describes with affection a relationship between school learning
and the "tune of the hickory stick:' A recent Hollywood film, Teaching
Miss Tingle, is about a schoolteacher kidnapped by her students who
torture her physically and psychologically. Numerous web sites exist