For those awakening to the world these days, it´s a difficult to task to accept many things we have known since childhood and trusted as truth, are simply not truth. And it´s disconcerting to realize that those years spent in public school, forced into conforming to the whims of our peers, may have had a different agenda lurking under the surface. The discussions about public schooling seem to center around money and security of late, how to keep the warehouse-like buildings funded and safe, but little is said about what our children are actually being taught.
I´ve said it before, I didn´t like school as a child and that first day of being pushed into a room full of children was quite disturbing to me as I had never spent time in kindergarten or daycare. My first 5 ˝ years were spent playing, exploring and discovering the world of make believe and the only television I recall watching was Captain Kangaroo as I ate my breakfast. Even as a very young child, I enjoyed being alone, so I still remember the trauma of being forced into daily competition with 20 plus kids. My first day of school I came home and declared I was never going back, but soon learned that I had no choice, so over the years I invested a lot of time attempting to get out of school.
I couldn´t explain how I felt about school, I couldn´t describe how oppressive it felt, how I feared the bullies and their followers, how I had very little in common with my peers and how I could not fit in. My grades were decent with little effort or thought and I spent a lot of time attempting to be invisible and avoiding attention. The work seemed boring and rote and rarely did a teacher or subject come along that truly inspired and enthralled my imagination. And it felt as though we were all exposed, everyone knew who were the good kids, the bad kids, the rich kids, the poor kids, the troubled kids and the nothings, almost as though we wore labels on our heads.
Some believe that our children are being deliberately dumbed down and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration and author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America has put together a chronological history of the past 100 years of education reform to prove that is the case. At one point in her fascinating career, Ms. Iserbyt trained to become a change agent to discover how so many non-academic subjects were being pushed into our public school system. In an interview she stated, "Here I was being taught how to identify resistors. The people, who are smart people, who know that sex ed, drug ed, decision making, alcohol education, bullying education, critical thinking, everything that has education hanging off the end of it, watch it! That´s a red flag for any parent or anyone out there listening, because that is not traditional education, that is brain washing. Those programs, they say they´re good for our children; all of them are devoted to behavioral change, behavioral and attitudinal change. And basically the purpose of them is to do exactly opposite of what they say they are meant to do." You Tube
John Taylor Gatto, 1991´s New York State Teacher of the Year, states there are six lessons he taught and they have nothing to do with reading and writing. He believes the mandated public school curriculum was created to regulate the poor and maintain a permanent underclass. Millions of children across America are being taught that they must stay in their "class" and accept that they are under constant surveillance. They are also being schooled to turn off their seeking minds and drive for knowledge like a light switch and to hand over the most simple rights to authority, including going to the restroom when feeling the need. And perhaps the most detrimental lessons being taught across America is that curiosity is not rewarded, only conformity is approved and for a child to define his worth he must look to outside officials. The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
Mr. Gatto resigned from teaching the same year he became Teacher of the Year, he stated the frustration and disgust grew too heavy for him to carry any longer. He sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal entitled, "I Quit, I Think", in which he stated, "Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents." Mr. Gatto explained how in thirty years of teaching he "almost never" met a learning disabled child and hardly ever a gifted or talented one, but schooling puts children in categories that will follow them the rest of their lives. He also stated there is no right way to educate children, but with the school system set up as it is and with many jobs and contracts depending on its existence, it almost guarantees true education will not occur. He ended the essay by stating, "I can´t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don´t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I´ll be looking for work." I Quit, I Think
At the 1973 International Education Seminar Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, speaking as an expert in public education, has been widely quoted as having said, "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future." And in 2002 President Bush signed the executive order introducing the President´s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health allowing for the mental health screening of all school age children. New Freedom Commission
And now controversial programs like Teen Screen are entering our schools luring children as young as 9, with movie passes and free pizza, to take a suicide survey. The screening requires no written parental approval and after a 10-minute survey children are handed over to a clinician who decides their state of mental health and more times than not prescribes medications, many of which are not approved for children and have black box labeling. So children are no longer just being dumbed down, but also drugged. Psyche Search
So why would our government want to dumb down the population? It seems to make little sense and of course, with the technology we possess we feel we are a highly intelligent lot, but is that truth? It has been said a child only needs approximately 50 contact hours to learn the basics of reading, writing and math, enough to go into the world and decide his own fate. The basics is all that is needed to decide what we want to be taught and what we choose to pursue, yet we keep children in school for 12+ years, extending immaturity and teach them a predestined curriculum despite where their curiosities lay. Albert Einstein once said, "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
We have become quite a dependent group of folks; we make nothing and purchase everything. Although schools speak of instilling basic skills, we have lost our knowledge, we don´t make our own clothes, grow our own food, raise our own kids and the money we earn hinges on someone else´s opinion of us and how well we conform. We cannot un-busy ourselves and hear silence and we don´t know how to be alone. We are constantly entertained or distracted and have lost touch with community, family and faith. We are in need of everything the big corporations have to offer and we have been taught dependence, consumerism and how to be compliant citizens. Some say this is the result of living in the modern world, others believe it is a trend leading to a very different and frightening future.
So the question remains, why are we being dumbed down? Ms. Iserbyt believes we are undergoing a communist takeover and that would certainly explain the absence of the media and public debate in many political decisions. She believes that programs like School to Work and No Child Left Behind are modeled after the Soviet quota system, where the government decides exactly how many children can become successful and how many children will be left with the grunt work. Walks Like A Duck; Talks Like A Duck… And Mr. Gatto believes we adopted the Prussian system of education because it "was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." Against School
Mr. Gatto quotes then Princeton president Woodrow Wilson as having said to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909, "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." As I read this quote, a chill ran down my spine, have we been categorized since our first day of school, our future defined without us even knowing? How many potentially fantastic lawyers and doctors are working as clerks? How many life changing visionaries are pumping gas or making burgers? How many bored college graduates are sitting in a cubicle wishing they were anywhere else? How many artists, thinkers or inventors are working dead end jobs and coming home everyday too exhausted to lift a brush, read a book or tinker on a project? And how many of us accept this as "just the way it is"?
I have long suspected that creativity and inventiveness were being weeded out of society and it doesn´t take long of listening to Top 40 radio or watching television or observing people in a mall for an hour to see the lack. We have been schooled to become hard working robots and good conforming, consuming livestock and many of us just didn´t notice, we accepted it as part of being grown up. The conspiracy theorists state that we are slaves, trapped by invisible bars while believing lies of freedom and although my mind revolts at the thought, there is truth to that idea. And I suppose the best slaves do not know they are slaves and love and trust the slave master. Just as we love and trust our masters when they take another freedom and tell us it is for our safety. When they lock our children into warehouses, complete with guards and legal drugs, we trust that our children are safe and when they teach our kids less and less academics and more and more politically correct garbage, we know they are educated.
This subject is too vast to cover in one article; the strands of deceit are too deeply sewn into the fabric of our society and perhaps are too shocking for most to face. The purpose of public schooling is to produce a solid base of mindless workers and the illusion is that we can step out of our predestined role, otherwise known as our permanent record. We are told that if we study hard and go to school then we can climb to the top of the stack and be anything we want, even president, but when we pursue our dreams, failing again and again, we are told to give it up, get a real job and contribute to society. We are living in a morass of cross purposes and conflicting ideas and the child that can make it through schooling without being drugged, altered and molded into conforming is a rarity and exactly what is needed to save this country.
I´ve said it before, I didn´t like school as a child and that first day of being pushed into a room full of children was quite disturbing to me as I had never spent time in kindergarten or daycare. My first 5 ˝ years were spent playing, exploring and discovering the world of make believe and the only television I recall watching was Captain Kangaroo as I ate my breakfast. Even as a very young child, I enjoyed being alone, so I still remember the trauma of being forced into daily competition with 20 plus kids. My first day of school I came home and declared I was never going back, but soon learned that I had no choice, so over the years I invested a lot of time attempting to get out of school.
I couldn´t explain how I felt about school, I couldn´t describe how oppressive it felt, how I feared the bullies and their followers, how I had very little in common with my peers and how I could not fit in. My grades were decent with little effort or thought and I spent a lot of time attempting to be invisible and avoiding attention. The work seemed boring and rote and rarely did a teacher or subject come along that truly inspired and enthralled my imagination. And it felt as though we were all exposed, everyone knew who were the good kids, the bad kids, the rich kids, the poor kids, the troubled kids and the nothings, almost as though we wore labels on our heads.
Some believe that our children are being deliberately dumbed down and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration and author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America has put together a chronological history of the past 100 years of education reform to prove that is the case. At one point in her fascinating career, Ms. Iserbyt trained to become a change agent to discover how so many non-academic subjects were being pushed into our public school system. In an interview she stated, "Here I was being taught how to identify resistors. The people, who are smart people, who know that sex ed, drug ed, decision making, alcohol education, bullying education, critical thinking, everything that has education hanging off the end of it, watch it! That´s a red flag for any parent or anyone out there listening, because that is not traditional education, that is brain washing. Those programs, they say they´re good for our children; all of them are devoted to behavioral change, behavioral and attitudinal change. And basically the purpose of them is to do exactly opposite of what they say they are meant to do." You Tube
John Taylor Gatto, 1991´s New York State Teacher of the Year, states there are six lessons he taught and they have nothing to do with reading and writing. He believes the mandated public school curriculum was created to regulate the poor and maintain a permanent underclass. Millions of children across America are being taught that they must stay in their "class" and accept that they are under constant surveillance. They are also being schooled to turn off their seeking minds and drive for knowledge like a light switch and to hand over the most simple rights to authority, including going to the restroom when feeling the need. And perhaps the most detrimental lessons being taught across America is that curiosity is not rewarded, only conformity is approved and for a child to define his worth he must look to outside officials. The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
Mr. Gatto resigned from teaching the same year he became Teacher of the Year, he stated the frustration and disgust grew too heavy for him to carry any longer. He sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal entitled, "I Quit, I Think", in which he stated, "Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents." Mr. Gatto explained how in thirty years of teaching he "almost never" met a learning disabled child and hardly ever a gifted or talented one, but schooling puts children in categories that will follow them the rest of their lives. He also stated there is no right way to educate children, but with the school system set up as it is and with many jobs and contracts depending on its existence, it almost guarantees true education will not occur. He ended the essay by stating, "I can´t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don´t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I´ll be looking for work." I Quit, I Think
At the 1973 International Education Seminar Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, speaking as an expert in public education, has been widely quoted as having said, "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future." And in 2002 President Bush signed the executive order introducing the President´s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health allowing for the mental health screening of all school age children. New Freedom Commission
And now controversial programs like Teen Screen are entering our schools luring children as young as 9, with movie passes and free pizza, to take a suicide survey. The screening requires no written parental approval and after a 10-minute survey children are handed over to a clinician who decides their state of mental health and more times than not prescribes medications, many of which are not approved for children and have black box labeling. So children are no longer just being dumbed down, but also drugged. Psyche Search
So why would our government want to dumb down the population? It seems to make little sense and of course, with the technology we possess we feel we are a highly intelligent lot, but is that truth? It has been said a child only needs approximately 50 contact hours to learn the basics of reading, writing and math, enough to go into the world and decide his own fate. The basics is all that is needed to decide what we want to be taught and what we choose to pursue, yet we keep children in school for 12+ years, extending immaturity and teach them a predestined curriculum despite where their curiosities lay. Albert Einstein once said, "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
We have become quite a dependent group of folks; we make nothing and purchase everything. Although schools speak of instilling basic skills, we have lost our knowledge, we don´t make our own clothes, grow our own food, raise our own kids and the money we earn hinges on someone else´s opinion of us and how well we conform. We cannot un-busy ourselves and hear silence and we don´t know how to be alone. We are constantly entertained or distracted and have lost touch with community, family and faith. We are in need of everything the big corporations have to offer and we have been taught dependence, consumerism and how to be compliant citizens. Some say this is the result of living in the modern world, others believe it is a trend leading to a very different and frightening future.
So the question remains, why are we being dumbed down? Ms. Iserbyt believes we are undergoing a communist takeover and that would certainly explain the absence of the media and public debate in many political decisions. She believes that programs like School to Work and No Child Left Behind are modeled after the Soviet quota system, where the government decides exactly how many children can become successful and how many children will be left with the grunt work. Walks Like A Duck; Talks Like A Duck… And Mr. Gatto believes we adopted the Prussian system of education because it "was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." Against School
Mr. Gatto quotes then Princeton president Woodrow Wilson as having said to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909, "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." As I read this quote, a chill ran down my spine, have we been categorized since our first day of school, our future defined without us even knowing? How many potentially fantastic lawyers and doctors are working as clerks? How many life changing visionaries are pumping gas or making burgers? How many bored college graduates are sitting in a cubicle wishing they were anywhere else? How many artists, thinkers or inventors are working dead end jobs and coming home everyday too exhausted to lift a brush, read a book or tinker on a project? And how many of us accept this as "just the way it is"?
I have long suspected that creativity and inventiveness were being weeded out of society and it doesn´t take long of listening to Top 40 radio or watching television or observing people in a mall for an hour to see the lack. We have been schooled to become hard working robots and good conforming, consuming livestock and many of us just didn´t notice, we accepted it as part of being grown up. The conspiracy theorists state that we are slaves, trapped by invisible bars while believing lies of freedom and although my mind revolts at the thought, there is truth to that idea. And I suppose the best slaves do not know they are slaves and love and trust the slave master. Just as we love and trust our masters when they take another freedom and tell us it is for our safety. When they lock our children into warehouses, complete with guards and legal drugs, we trust that our children are safe and when they teach our kids less and less academics and more and more politically correct garbage, we know they are educated.
This subject is too vast to cover in one article; the strands of deceit are too deeply sewn into the fabric of our society and perhaps are too shocking for most to face. The purpose of public schooling is to produce a solid base of mindless workers and the illusion is that we can step out of our predestined role, otherwise known as our permanent record. We are told that if we study hard and go to school then we can climb to the top of the stack and be anything we want, even president, but when we pursue our dreams, failing again and again, we are told to give it up, get a real job and contribute to society. We are living in a morass of cross purposes and conflicting ideas and the child that can make it through schooling without being drugged, altered and molded into conforming is a rarity and exactly what is needed to save this country.
