We continue with J.T. Gatto's work: The Underground History of American Education. You know if we really mean about looking out for the children here in America, we would pull them out of the indoctrination centers posing as public schools. If they are public schools, why does the public have no say about how they are operated. This secular humanist bulls##t is front in center in our faces right now, we seen it in our streets last summer. Compulsory schooling does not work,never has never will.
People,and children especially should be left to learn at their own pace,and this is best done by parents,and or real schools where people actually go to learn what they want to learn about. I got news for you, if you cannot afford the time it takes to raise children, you should not have offspring. If you are looking at school as a babysitter, you have failed as a parent, it might not seem like it when they are young, but you will get it by the time they are supposed to be adults....Gatto knew...
....One day after spending nearly my entire life inside a school building as student and teacher, I quit. But not before I saw some things you ought to know. McCourt is right, spit flies everywhere in the classroom and school, children mock us because of it. The smell of saliva. I had forgotten until I returned as a teacher. Put the cosmic aspect aside and come back again into school with me. See it from the inside with grownup eyes.
On my first day back to school I was hired to substitute in a horrible place, Wadleigh Junior High School, nicknamed "the death school" by regulars at the West End Tavern near Columbia. Jean Stapleton (Archie Bunker’s wife, Edith) had gone there as a young girl; so had Anäis Nin, celebrated diarist and writer of erotica. Some palace revolution long before I got there had altered the nature of this school from an earnest, respectable Victorian lock-up to something indescribable. During my teaching debut at Wadleigh, I was attacked by a student determined to bash my brains out with a chair.
Wadleigh was located three blocks from that notorious 110th Street corner in Harlem made famous by a bestseller of the day, New York Confidential, which called it "the most dangerous intersection in America." I mention danger as the backdrop of my teaching debut because two kinds of peril were in the air that season: one, phony as my teaching license, was the "Cuban Missile Crisis"; the other, only too genuine, was a predicament without any possible solution, a deadly brew compounded from twelve hundred black teenagers penned inside a gloomy brick pile for six hours a day, with a white guard staff misnamed "faculty" manning the light towers and machine-gun posts. This faculty was charged with dribbling out something called "curriculum" to inmates, a gruel so thin Wadleigh might rather have been a home for the feeble-minded than a place of education.
My own motive in being there was a personal quest. I was playing hooky from my real job as a Madison Avenue ad writer flogging cigarettes and shaving cream, a fraternity boy’s dream job. Not a single day without Beefeater Martinis, then the preferred ad man’s tipple, not a morning without headache, not a single professional achievement worth the bother. I was hardly a moralist in those days, but I wasn’t a moron either. Thoughts of a future composed of writing fifty words or so a week, drunk every day, hunting sensation every night, had begun to make me nervous. Sitting around the West End one weekend I decided to see what school teaching was like.
Harlem then was an ineffable place where the hip white in-crowd played in those last few moments before the fires and riots of the 1960s broke out. Black and white still pretended it was the same high-style Harlem of WWII years, but a new awareness was dawning among teenagers. Perhaps Mama had been sold a bill of goods about the brighter tomorrow progressive America was arranging for black folks, but the kids knew better.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/part-3-underground-history-of-american.html
