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

Incident at Highland High 185
that tegard, and with superintendents being the worst of the worst! I
told the kids (quietly, I swear) to have their parents demand that every
school employee in their district be required to post their own grade/
test records prominently on their doors and that this would cause the
whole sorry house of mirrors to shatter like Humpty Dumpty.
Once these seeds were planted, all subject to easy verification,
. they would grow on their own; in these minds closed tightly as clams
by prosperity and the climate of fear I believed Highland was retailing
as a crowd control device, this mass of anomalous data would act
as a strong acid burning minds open.
The most effective single body of information I transmitted was
about the admission policies at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton,
and similar prestigious places, places, which reject huge numbers of
valedictorians, perfect GPA averagers, and perfect SAT scores every
year in favor of applicants with "a record of distinction" (as Harvard
admissions director Marlyn McGrath was quoted as saying
a few years ago). Have you started a successful business Have you
founded a charity Have you sailed around the world alone, walked
from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, Alaska without professional
help; can you take a tractor down to its component parts and reassemble
it all by yourself ...
Can teenagers do these things Of course they can. High school
dropout Richard Branson, who you heard about in "Walkabout: London;'
is shown in my daily newspaper this morning (July 29, 2008)
cracking a bottle of champagne over the nose of the spaceship he just
completed to carry tourists into space at some $200,000 a seat (more
than 250 have paid so far). It's named "Eve" in honor of his single
mother, Eve Branson, who had the foresight to encourage him to walk
miles on his own through London at the age of four. Although only a
small fraction of the total, a much larger absolute number of teenagers
is already well launched into real life than you can possibly imagine
if you've swallowed the school myth hook, line and sinker.
The student response was electrifying. Rather than the indifference
to a more generalized message that I had encountered at Crys-