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

124 WEAPONS OF MASS' INSTRUCTION
[emphasis added) ... schools as we know them today will have no
place in the future:' Papert offered two possible destinies for institutional
schooling - transformation "into something new" or "wither
away and be replaced:' In the decades since that was written, nearly
three million homeschoolers have emerged and well over a million
people drop out of school as of 2009. In urban schools it's an open secret
that after lunch, classroom attendance is difficult to maintain and
attention virtually impossible.
The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
The minute you are willing to acknowledge how radically irrelevant
school offerings actually are, the question of intent rears its disturbing
head. Is this irrelevance an accident of incompetence Is it possible
the managers of institutional schooling don't know themselves
what to do, but having inherited command of a dangerously unstable
vessel, must sail it somehow to a destination unknown For an army
of local superintendents and principals this is surely true - thejob
is too good to abandon, its perks too rich to give up; they might like
to change and adapt but the command/control structure won't allow
any strong deviations from system logic.
Yet even having granted professional frontline confusion, the spectre
of some darker intent at the level of policy won't go away. Schooling
in the short and intermediate run is so unmistakably beneficial to
some of the orders of society who possess power to plan for the whole
that the possibility of these surrendering to the temptation to use institutional
schooling for social engineering can't be dismissed. And
once that filter is activated in your critical consciousness, evidence
presents itself constantly that indeed this is so. Consider this excerpt
from a speech delivered in 1940 to the Association for the Advancement
of Science by the legendary political philosopher and journalist,
Walter Lippmann:
... during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible
for education have progressively removed from the curriculum