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

202 WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
We will start at the weakest link in the German school chain, the
standardized tests which are despised by everyone, school personnel
included. The recent past has given us two astonishing accomplishments
of citizen action - no, make that three - which should lift
your spirits as you prepare to ruin the testing empire - instances
of impregnable social fortresses blown to pieces by disorganized, unbudgeted
decisions of ordinary people. Call these examples "Bartleby
Moments:' Think of the ending of the Vietnam War, when young
people filled the streets; think of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall;
think of the swift dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Bartleby Project
By the end of WWII, schooling had replaced education in the US,
and shortly afterwards, standardized testing became the steel band
holding the entire enterprise together. Test scores rather than accomplishment
became the mark of excellence as early as 1960, and step by
step the public was brought, through various forms of coercion including
journalism, to believe that marks on a piece of paper were a
fair and accurate proxy for human quality. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
the Nobel Prize winning Russian author, said, in a Pravda article
on September 18, 1988, entitled"How to Revitalize Russia:"
No road for the people [to recover from Communism] will
ever be open unless the government completely gives up control
over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country
into an abyss and it does not know the way out.
Break the grip of official testing on students, parents and teachers, and
we will have taken the logical first step in revitalizing education. But
nobody should believe this step can be taken politically - too much
money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action;
the dynamics of our society tend toward the creation of public opinion,
not any response to it. There is only one major exception to that
rule: Taking to the streets. In the past half-century the US has witnessed
successful citizen action many times: In the overthrow of the