john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction
john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction
john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction
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Weapons <strong>of</strong> Mass Instruction<br />
II3<br />
Social Engineering<br />
Thanks to a 24-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg<br />
who created Facebook, and others like him who founded YouTube,<br />
MySpace and other social networks still unmonitored by political authorities<br />
or academics, thanks to the World-Wide Web and the Internet<br />
as platforms for individually generated connections, the power <strong>of</strong><br />
school as a great dis-connector has been weakened.<br />
These vehicles enable people without any particular status, to<br />
hook up with one another; they even allow mixtures <strong>of</strong> nobodies and<br />
somebodies to exchange ideas and plans; they provide a fountain <strong>of</strong><br />
information which replenishes itself constantly; they encourage creativity<br />
among <strong>mass</strong>es consigned by schooling to become reliable consumers.<br />
Even though this new force is still ih early childhood, already<br />
it has caused governments to surrender a great deal <strong>of</strong> power over<br />
their own currencies. It has emboldened accumulations <strong>of</strong> capital to<br />
move at the speed <strong>of</strong>light from one country to another, destabilizing<br />
conventional markets, making national loyalties conditional and<br />
patriotism questionable. Thanks to the vast new ball <strong>of</strong> connections,<br />
<strong>of</strong>ficial truth in every conceivable area is subject to verification by a<br />
promiscuous collection <strong>of</strong> uncertified critics armed with the tools to<br />
back up their contrarian critiques.<br />
Thanks to the Internet, the concept <strong>of</strong> <strong>mass</strong> schooling by experts<br />
is nearly exhausted.<br />
Lying by Omission<br />
Bruno is a college student in Portugal who wrote to me on May I7,<br />
2008 asking for my take on several matters for which his school holds<br />
<strong>of</strong>ficial positions and monitors compliance with its stances through<br />
testing. It's a common situation everywhere. These unstated biases<br />
presented as gospel truth makes <strong>of</strong>ficial schooling dangerously antieducational,<br />
yet this phenomenon in action is difficult to detect, and<br />
among the young, virtually impossible.<br />
Sometimes these pernicious biases are managed simply by omitting<br />
some key piece <strong>of</strong> information. Such was the case that bothered