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

WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
woman or man was surviving the scrutiny of those invisible judges
who held the scales of human worth. That was of central interest.
That life had recently been demonstrated to be possible in fantastic
variety in the total absence of light and photosynthesis, by a mixture
of chemicals and heat alone, might have been of interest to a geek, but
it had nothing to offer the future managers of geeks.
Among the many secrets withheld from the students at Highland
(or Crystal Springs) was the fact that colleges were businesses before
they were anything else, businesses desperate for warm bodies in order
to meet payrolls. They had little to worry about in finding a place
which would gladly exchange its degree for a bag of money, and while
elite college admission couldn't be guaranteed because the number of
applicants always exceeded the number of seats, "c" students like Al
Gore, John Kennedy, John Kerry, George Bush, John McCain (who
finished 895th out of 900 graduates at Annapolis, and lost five airplanes
of which he was a pilot) and Franklin Roosevelt had no difficulty
being admitted to elite colleges and graduating from them.
Since I knew the kids at Highland would be worried about college,
I decided to build my talk around the actual situation and criteria
for admission - not around the fantasy schooling uses to maintain
discipline. I would aim to undermine the foundation of their vague
fears - which the school like most schools had exploited to the maximum.
The strategy wasn t to preach, but instead to direct attention to
the masses of prominent people, past and present, who had somehow
managed to sidestep the big school lie and to make success without it.
For instance, you already know the computer industry was built on
the vision of dropouts; you know how each of our Nobel Prize creative
writers was a dropout; you know that the entertainment industry
in all its facets is overwhelmingly dominated by dropouts, the fast
food industry, too; and how the politicians we entrust national policy
to were almost uniformly mediocre students.
I was armed with information from The New York Times which put
the standardized test scores of superintendents, principals, and teachers
at almost the very bottom of twenty major occupational groups in