17 Reader Responses

1. human? Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 3:02 pm

   alls i can say is there is no chance in hell that my children will spend a single day attending public school.

2. Occult Investigator Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 3:11 pm

   I feel the same way. Personally, I think it’s great these parents up and left the PTA. But I do recognize the fact that people actually work and can’t sit around with their kids all day. But that’s precisely why homeschooling usually consists of many families collaborating together… It’s the PTA without the T or the A (and I don’t mean tits and ass)

3. hf Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 3:47 pm

   It seems possible, even likely, that the conservative elite would use this to weaken public schools. But I see major, oppressive problems with education. Maybe if we can end wage slavery — and I have some thoughts in that direction — the slave schools will take care of themselves.

4. Fell Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 4:10 pm

   Yeah I am not too worried. As I witness more and more private schools à la Waldorf opening up, I’m not too worried. If education is a marketplace, there will always be a place for the McDonald’s of schools (public) and there will be more and more cost effective and applicable ways to bring better education to the masses as the teaching programmes, technology, information design, and communications improve. I wouldn’t worry too much.

   On the other hand, I’m all for a sort of neo-contemporary aristocracy where kids with Nintendos implanted in their faces are showing up Christians and anyone under-educated enough to get in their way. I want them to have rayguns for hands, too.

5. brekin Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 4:55 pm

   Sometimes I look at public school reform like prison reform. How much can you really change it before it stops being what it is intended to be? Not to say that private school or homeschool can’t be just as bad or worse. It just seems public school is designed for a certain purpose, if someone like Gatto gets this out there, and people start taking their children out of public school then that would seem a good thing. Why support a bad system, public or private?

6. lord moranosa Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 5:00 pm

   in reading some of gatto’s thought, particularly his insights into the early american culture that was based upon a more calvinistic approach of bettering one’s self through the life-experiences of hard work, my thoughts on public education remains two-fold:

   a) the current ’system’ has obviously degraded into a situation whereas underpaid and under-prepared instructors have fallen into a realm of attaining a status of non-effective, in terms of actually teaching students anything redeeming. this current conveyor belt system of churning out students that are qualified to be either wage-slaves or corporate meat puppets creates a same-as-the-other-side paradigm where the corporate meat puppets are just as dead in mind as the wage-slaves.

   b) the current complexity of the current world-stage requires an educational system that can be pliable, from a position and perspective that supersedes the local school board status. many local school boards are too eager to assure political correct materials and appeasing any type of parental zealousiness that may lead to a law suit, than to truly sit down and explore the obvious ongoing theories of learning and educating a student body to exceed beyond the irony and fallacies of one-to-one only correspondences.

   many private schools are dogged by a type of elitist stigma, where the ‘best and the brightest’ are often troubled minds doing what money and family dictate. the advantages of homeschooling seems to bring forth some of the more vital points gatto makes: namely, that hands on experience does create a self-confidence and self-respect that current educational contemporary practises refuses to pursue. both private and public schools are beseiged with the burden of financial stipulations (public schools never enough, private schools too much…) which flows directly into parental concerns (public schools faced with potential law suits by ‘concerned’ parents, while private schools afflicted with loss of potential revenues through generous donations by the affluent….). the essence then of education needs to be revisited, from some of the foundational points examined by gatto in studying the downsizing of the current american educational system by corporate interests over the last one-hundred and twenty-five years or so, to the continuous redefinition of what the human mind can achieve when given the active stimuli called ‘imagination’.

7. Occult Investigator Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 5:33 pm

   It seems possible, even likely, that the conservative elite would use this to weaken public schools.

   I think this is pretty much the opposite of the case. I think what Gatto’s trying to say is that the very people that the public school system serves is the elite

8. alistair Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 5:35 pm

   the educational system isn`t broken in the way we would consider a mechanism broken. it has been usurped by union labour types and socialist technocrats. the result is a committee-driven product that spews out malformed proto-robots heading for wage-slavery. one visit to the local mall on a summer`s afternoon(which i did today in a starbuck`s induced daze.) will find you witnessing the future leaders of our community getting thier endorphine fix by jamming thier mother`s visa card into as many p.o.s. as possible before dinner.
   “education” is all of what we do. not just from bell to bell. in our house we are constantly providing things for the children to get involved in. i can`t expect people with robot minds to provide stimulation for my children, i have to do it myself. we do painting, music, games, puzzles, chase the cats around, play pranks on the niegbours, play soccer, y`know, stuff. too many parent`s think that education is someone else`s job. have you ever spoke to a gradeschool teacher lately? dial tone………………………………………………..if you want something done right, do it yourself.
   government is a poor deliver of services. we know that. why do we expect education to be any different?

9. human? Says:
   July 27th, 2005 at 5:38 pm

   tim, you should look into what role Skull & Bones members have played in developing American education…..

   i have a feeling that what is going on isnt simply bad schools, or dumbing down… i think that its much darker & has some serious occult/magic stuff going on…

   one
   human?

10. Occult Investigator Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 5:59 pm

    I’ll check it out. The Rockefeller/Morgan/Carnegie cartel seems to have a pretty heavy hand in it anyway.

    Just to clarify on some other points though: two of my sisters are public school teachers. And they are great and I respect the work they do immensely. My girlfriend is a teacher, and I’ve taught professionally (though in a corporation). I don’t want it to seem like I’m downplaying what any of these people do, because it’s a hard fucking job.

    Anyway, one of Gatto’s best pieces is when he lists the 6 topics that he is forced to teach:

    “The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.”
    “The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch.”
    “The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.”
    “The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study.”
    “In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth.”
    “In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched.”

    http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/6-lesson-schoolteacher.html

11. Haeresis Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 8:19 pm

    The way I see it, you only get one chance to educate your kids. There is no “within” option because you can’t fix the system and then send them back through. My kids attend an excellent public school, but when that option wasn’t available (vacaville) we pulled them out and educated them ourselves. Schools have become so politicized it’s almost impossible to get an actual education in between tug-o-wars of ideology.

12. Occult Investigator Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 8:22 pm

    You sent them to Vacaville prison? No wonder they didn’t get a good education!

13. Daniel Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 8:43 pm

    Do we reform slavery, or do we abandon it? Hmmm…

    That’s basically how I see the question.

14. Nicq MacDonald Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 9:38 pm

    A few thoughts, as someone who went through 13 years in public schools, has many friends who were homeschooled, and has many friends who are now schoolteachers:

    The school system does not exist in a vacuum, and can’t be treated as if it does. The school system is incapable of giving students a complete education- it always has been incapable of this, and always will be. As one of my friends (who has the most thankless job in the known universe- teaching 7th grade mathematics) put it, “education is a tripod, and that tripod consists of the student, the teacher, and the parents. If all three aren’t doing their job, the system doesn’t work. Simple as that.” I came through the public schools with a fairly decent education, for a number of reasons:

    - at least up until high school, I actually gave a damn.

    - the reason I gave a damn was family pressure. If the parents aren’t constantly reminding their kids of the importance of their studies, that they’ve gotta keep cracking the books or their harder-working, less-demanding counterparts in (blank) third-world country will get their job and they’ll be out on the street after globalization slathers the planet with a Pakistani bricklayer’s idea of prosperity (to quote Neil Stephenson), that they aren’t entitled to prosperity, and that education is the difference between owning a Lexus and starving under the Olive Trees… well, the kids aren’t going to give a damn. Parents have to keep their children under the gun.

    - not only that, parents need to enrich the educational experience. Children need to be introduced to literature outside of the school curriculum, introduced to ideas and culture, and given educational toys. The last one is the most frustrating, given that most of the toys listed as “educational” these days are uninteresting junk, and a startling majority of computer and video games are completely mindless. I grew up on chemistry sets, mecchano, and interesting computer games (my parents wouldn’t let me have a nintendo or sega, so I became hooked on early PC games- SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, Civilization, Colonization, and the like left an indelible imprint on my thinking. Many of the early “sim” games came with manuals that doubled as accessible science textbooks. These days, Maxis seems more interested in making inane junk like “The Sims”…)

    - kids need career goals other than “TV star” or “basketball player”. I remember standing around the bus stop with kids who were sure that they’d grow up and be in the NBA or act in movies- and, hence, didn’t see why they needed to bother with any of that “math” or “science” stuff. My goal? I wanted to be a scientist. While my goals have changed, my dedication to learning hasn’t. While it might seem harmless for kids to have silly dreams in the early grades, it is the foundation built in these grades, learning basic mathematical and linguistic concepts, that informs the rest of their lives.

    - I have many homeschooled friends. From what I can tell, none of them had a better education than I did- though they know latin, I know more chemistry and American history. I consider it just about break-even; if you live in a city with a decent public school system, and supplement your kid’s education a bit here and there, they’ll probably come out as well as their homeschooled counterparts.

    - Most of the educational “reform” packages I see offered by the GOP these days are no more than a social engineering package designed to push the best and the brightest of lower-and-middle class students into religious indoctrination centers while the rest of their peers are left to rot in decaying public schools, thus creating an educated, religious overclass and an easily manipulated underclass. No thanks. The public school system may not be the greatest thing in the world, but it beats the alternative.

15. Occult Investigator Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 9:54 pm

    Tons of great points, Nicq. As far as the homeschool vs. public school debate, in my eyes, its not the content of the education so much as it is the style of the education. You seem like a pretty strong self-directed learner, as am I and many others here. People who are that way naturally seem to come out more unscathed from public school. My main problem with public school is that they don’t teach you to be a self-directed learner. People like us are the exception rather than the rule. But what if they were extremely common? And what if it inspired life long self-directed learning on a grand scale? What if your next door neighbor was systematically studying the history of Russian literature as we speak? Another was training themselves in physics, another in military strategy, another in botany - all on their own, all in their spare time. It would be fucking nuts and things would be wildly different. To me, the thing that homeschooling or alternatives seem to instill is all about the process which is then extended throughout one’s life into all kinds of areas outside of simply those you studied in school.

16. Arizona Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 11:15 pm

    My son, at age 12, tried to reform the system through a proposed “10 minute schoolplan” whereby teachers were given 10 mins to “sell” a lesson after which kids could leave if not interested and repair to a self-directed learning centre (basically a room with library and internet access, maybe a workbench for tinkering). He tried to distribute information sheets on his plan but these were confiscated. He then boycotted the school (with my consent) for denying him his rights under CROC (UN Convention on the Rights Of the Child). The bureaucrats threatened me over what they perceived as his truancy and I threatened them back over their human rights abuses. The standoff started when he’d only attended high school (oz system) for 6 weeks and lasted for most of a year .

    In the end, after I’d written to the top educational bureaucrat, a mediation session was called at which the school’s principal, my son’s friends and their parents, and education officials attended. The meeting found no other solution besides home schooling. My son never returned to school. I had hoped to return to the workforce but I preferred to “mind” him at home. It’s been a very interesting ride.

    To this day, I believe his “10 minute schoolplan” was a brilliant idea that was just a little too far ahead of its time. It put control in the best hands: those of the kids.

    What my son mainly lacked from home schooling was access to science laboratories and good sporting facilities. I still believe that the community should fund such resources and make them freely available to kids, rich or poor. Information in the form of books and internet is now more freely available through libraries but equipment is harder to get a hold of if you’re poor (which we were).

    On the simple basis of our experience, it might seem that reform is not possible. It’s either/or. However, I do believe that reform would work if it was the right reform. And by that I mean radical reform.

17. Occult Investigator » 10 Minute Lesson Plan Says:
    July 27th, 2005 at 11:26 pm

    […]

    10 Minute Lesson Plan

    Arizona just posted what I think is an awesome idea that her 12 year old son came up with shortly b […]