John Gatto on Public Education

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Two items here:

http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/bookstore/dumbdnblum1.htm

Quote:

....The third lesson I teach is indifference….When the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch….Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.....

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@gungasnake,

You're completely taking that quote out of context.

He was talking about why he was leaving teaching and what is wrong with our schools. He thought timed lessons were a terrible thing.

I'm not really sure what your point is.

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@boomerang,

I picked the one item at random more or less simply to provide a flavor for the thing. Anything else I chose would be just as out of context and I didn't really want to quote the whole article.

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@boomerang,

Oh, yeah, the point... The point is that our public ed system is so totally fucked up (our military uses the term "FUBAR" for such things), as to be basically unfixable. It's still based on the Prussian model from the time of Friedrich der Grosse, and simply needs to be done away with.

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@gungasnake,

I'm surprised you would quote someone that is so anti-capitalist gunga.

Quote:

the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy

Are you turning communist on us?

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@gungasnake,

I agree that it is totally fucked up. I think "No Child Left Behind" and "Race To The Top" and other so called school reforms are only making it worse.

I think the public schools will eventually fail -- I think the reforms we're seeing now were designed to speed up the process -- and that schooling will be completely privatized and then it will be even worse.

To be clear: I don't blame teachers for the current state of affairs, I blame the politicians who have tied their hands.

My family hasn't opted out of school entirely yet but we've come about as close as you can without giving up on it. It could still happen that we wash our hands of it.

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@parados,

But he goes on to say...

Quote:

For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command center made up of "experts", a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato's republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology - drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.

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@boomerang,

Kids today. They don't understand sarcasm. I blame the schools.

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@gungasnake,

Reading through your links I came across this:

Quote:

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach students they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues….The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.

This comment really struck me in light of an ongoing conversation at home regarding Facebook. Mo (who is 11) wants a Facebook account because "everyone else has them" and I keep telling him "NO!".

It isn't so much the age thing (a person is supposed to be 13 to open a Facebook account) but the privacy thing. He absolutely can't understand why privacy is important.

I've never really thought of this "privacy isn't important" as a problem created by the school system so I looked up when Gatto wrote this and was surprised to find it was in 1992!

I've often wondered how we got to this point in thinking about privacy and now I have some new meat to chew on....

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@boomerang,

The internet never forgets anything. There's no way I'd want a kid under 16 or 17 or so having a facebook account; on the other hand if a kid is still an asshole at 17 (like I was), not having a facebook account probably won't save him....

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Modern version of a Dickens novel:

http://houston.cbslocal.com/2012/05/25/honor-student-supporting-siblings-arrested-for-being-too-exhausted-for-school/

Quote:

HOUSTON (CBS Houston) – A 17-year-old high school honor student who works two jobs and financially supports her two siblings is heading into summer on a sour note after spending a night in jail for being too tired to attend school.

Diane Tran was arrested in open court and sentenced to 24 hours in jail Wednesday after being repeatedly truant due to exhaustion. KHOU reports that Tran, a junior at Willis High School, was warned by Judge Lanny Moriarty last month to stop missing school. When she missed classes again this month, Moriarty wanted to make an example of Tran.

“If you let one (truant student) run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?” Moriarty asked, according to KHOU.

Tran told KHOU that in addition to taking advanced and honors classes, she works full-time and part-time jobs in an effort to try to support her older brother at Texas A&M and a younger sister in the Houston area. After Tran’s parents divorced, they both moved away from the honor student and her two siblings.

Tran was also fined $100.

1 Reply

Actually, George Washington was out earning the equivalent of a hundred K or so as a surveyor at age 16 or 17 or at least so I've heard. He'd obviously be in prison for truancy in today's world.

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@gungasnake,

I just read this elsewhere. Crazy! Absolutely crazy!

But I think this is more about the court than the school.

If this judge wants to make an example of her then it should be a good example. This girl sounds pretty amazing.

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@gungasnake,

Washington was articled as a surveyor at age 15. He didn't make anything like that kind of money. There was little suveying to do in the settled part of Virginia, so he only made money on commissions, which were, to say the least, unreliable. Where he made his pile was in surveying parts of Virginia which had not been settled, when he was entitled to make claims of his own, and, of course, he had actually seen the land. He didn't make money off of that until after the revolution, and even then, more than half his land was simply stolen by squatters. He never enforced those claims, though, believing that most of the squatters were veterans of the revolution.

As for truancy, with no public school system, it wasn't an issue. Just about everyone who had to make a living in life was about their business by 14 at the latest--many apprentices started at 11 or 12. This is apples to oranges stuff--that era is not comparable to our contemporary world at all.

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@boomerang,

http://www.educationnews.org/parenting/number-of-homeschoolers-growing-nationwide/

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@boomerang,

Judge throws the poor girl in jail for truancy:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/texas-honor-student-thrown-jail-missing-school-article-1.1085027

Where is Charles Dickens when we needs him??

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1085026.1338066127!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/image.jpg

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@boomerang,

One FR poster notes that when something cannot be figured logically in any normal way, you can sometimes figure it out by following the money:

Quote:

My understanding is that if a student misses a certain number of days they , the school district, are ineligible for Federal reimbursement for tuition for that student. Follow the money

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That's true for state funds, too, and i've known since i was a child. I'm not surprised that that is news to the Freepers.

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@Setanta,

What's even funnier is how Freepers are all for Texas taking Fed money while bemoaning the fact that the Feds spend too much money.

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Hey . . . they're Freepers . . . one doesn't expect logic . . .

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John Gatto on Public Education

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