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

60 WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
beyond a point reached in early childhood retard the hard road to
maturity.
I learned more about mother and sister from those walks than I
could fully comprehend back then; today I realize that the personal
information gathered incidentally as we. walked was the most important
data I was ever to have about who we Gattos and Zimmers really
were. The walks were open-source learning of the highest order. I'd
gladly trade Cornell and Columbia for more of them.
Sixty-five years have passed since the last walk. Reflecting on
what I learned that way without effort tells me the most powerful educations
are always put together open-source. They can't be achieved
from somebody else's idea of which controlled inputs under which
artificial conditions produce the best outputs. The analogy of education
with laboratory science is a game for fools, learned fools who
have damaged lives beyond numbering, ruined the promise of America,
and have brought us face-to-face with a bleak future unless the
expansion of the schooling bubble can be reversed.
The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell
curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to
magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man. Real education
can only begin out of a foundation of self-awareness. Know the
truth of yourself or you are nothing but a pathetic human resource.
Your life will have missed it's point.
These are my reflections on Richard Branson's walkabout and my
own, and on the crime schooling commits daily by turning its back on
open-source learning.