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

10
Incident at HighLand High
Schooling and Education
Our time together is almost over. The book is nearly done. It's been a
journal of the reflections of an old man whose thoughts, sometimes
tormented, sometimes lucid, have been fixed on pedagogy, a term
which has survived from Roman days to designate a special class of
slave. Isn't that all you need to know My mother said to me often
when I was a little boy, "A word to the wise is sufficient:' Pedagogy is
the word. Under its influence I lived my life as a character in someone
else's script. So I imagine did you. If my book can help you to escape,
even partially, a similar destiny, I'll be content. The groaning it's cost
to write will have been worth it.
What I reached for in these pages wasn't a diatribe although parts
of them may seem so, nor was it only a critique although a critique
is here, too. My ambition goes beyond having you merely accept my
analysis; if I haven't provoked you into beginning an analysis of your
own I'll be disappointed to have been, for just another time, only a
schoolteacher. I need you to question your own schooling and the
price you paid to sit for it; I need you to dig behind the illusions of
education schooling produces; I need you to recognize how its imperial
energy drives your understanding long after the classroom door
seems to have closed forever.
School which began as a sometimes thing in colonial America, no
more than two hours a day a few months each year, isn't satisfied with
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