I Quit, I think.

[swestrup]

From Kuro5hin:

In 1991 John Taylor Gatto was a thirty-year veteran of the New York school system, and had been honored as both NYC and NY state Teacher of the Year. Then, at the height of his career, he published a provocative essay titled I Quit, I Think in the Wall Street Journal, and shortly thereafter he did indeed quit.

Nine years later Gatto published The Underground History of American Education, a massively researched exposition of his discontent with the education system. Now he's made it available to read online, and it's an eye-opener.

And here's a quote from the beginning of the book:

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

I have long suspected that the trick to being "smart" is having successfully resisted the dumbing that everyone tries to give you as you grow up. It helps explain why smart people tend to be poorly socialised; it's not that being smart makes you weird, it's that people who have, for whatever reason, no fear of being weird are mote likely to have their intellectual lives survive their socialisation.

That's not to say that I think there's "no such thing" as IQ, or that it doesn't help you be smart; but not much of life revolves around logic puzzles, and most logic puzzles can in fact be solved just by keeping your eye on the ball.

So I think that my view on schooling is that it's purpose is to provide children with an alternative view to whatever their parents provide them, as a failsafe (which is why it is vital that schools not be bound by 'community standards'), and it's a most unfortunate side-effect that they are breeding grounds for communicable stupidity.

Back to the quote: did you ever think that schooling was justified by 'mass dumbness'? Goodness, no. It's about socialisation and - more importantly from the government's perspective, I fear - manipulating unemployment figures.

[swestrup]

I haven't read much of the book yet, but it looks like you and the author agree on this point. He says that the school system is often justified by saying that it produces usefull conformity, but that its organized around the assumption that people need to be treated as if they're dumb.

The two, of course, go hand in hand.