Evening all, last one for today, we close the day with another chapter from J.T. Gatto's 'The Underground History Of American Education'....

..Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades,1 that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?...

..There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do—forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master....

..In the society just ahead, one profession has astonishingly good prospects. I’m referring to the various specialties associated with policing the angry, the disaffected, and the embittered. Because school promises are mathematically impossible to keep, they were, from the beginning, a Ponzi scheme like Social Security. The creative minority who unleashed this well-schooled whirlwind a hundred years ago seems to have finally exhausted its imaginative power as it transmuted slowly into a dominant minority without much creative energy. Dr. Toynbee points to such a transition as an unmistakable sign of society in decline. Another ominous sign for Toynbee: the increasing use of police and armies to protect private interests.

In 1939, on the eve of war, the defense budget of the United States was $11 billion (translated into a constant dollar, year-2000 equivalent). We were at peace. Today, at peace again, without a visible enemy on the horizon, the defense budget is twenty-four times higher. The appearance of a permanent military force in peacetime, which claims a huge share of society’s total expenditure, can’t be explained by saying we live in a dangerous time. When wasn’t that true? It is our own leadership which lives dangerously, dwelling in a Darwinian world in which its own people are suspect, their danger so far contained by ensnaring the managed population through schooling into a conspiracy against itself....

full chapter here

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/03/part-12-underground-history-of-american.html