What’s wrong with school?
Every day, all over the world, millions of bright young minds (including many reading this right now) are spending the best years of their lives being herded around by governments like cattle, responding to bells, whistles and other Pavlovian/Skinnerian conditioning.
“I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.” - John Thomas Grotto, 30-year teaching career, former 3-time New York ‘Teacher of the Year’
Young children are subjected to factory-style seating, standardized testing, and government textbooks creating uniformity, while suppressing skepticism and creativity. Modern schools over-develop competitive spirit while undermining compassion and curiosity. They promote cliques, gangs, small group mentalities, and “small-picture” thinkers. Grading and testing procedures hinder “big-picture” understanding; students are merely required to memorize trivial information like names, dates, places, events etc. just long enough to regurgitate for standardized multiple-choice tests.
Does this system seem like it was designed for learning? It’s no wonder that most kids hate school.
Millions of children are locked into this program Monday to Friday from 9-5 performing boring/arduous tasks against their will. Just like the workplace, only unquestioning compliance is rewarded. In The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto observes:
“Schools at present are the occupation of children; children have become employees, pensioners of the government at an early age … There is nothing or very little to do in school, but one thing is demanded—that children must attend, condemned to hours of desperation, pretending to do a job that doesn’t exist. At the end of the day, tired, fed up, full of aggression, their families feel the accumulated tedium of their pinched lives. Government jobs for children have broken the spirit of our people.”
Let’s think about this for a minute … School is compulsory and state-enforced via truancy laws (and only 3% of children receive homeschooling in the United States). Children spend a mandatory 13 years, from kindergarten to high school, as a full-time “government learner” being “prepared for life” … and yet, when they get out, they have no real skills. 13 years and children are never taught how to grow a garden, how to build a house, how to fix a car, how to balance a checkbook, how to operate a small business, or how to cook healthy meals. They come out with no real knowledge about maintenance of physical and mental health, sex, spirituality, history, finance, business.
I used to think mass public education existed to indoctrinate us, but there’s more. It exists to waste children’s most valuable learning years. It’s designed to hold you back, stifle creativity, and induce mental and physical - yes physical - atrophy.
But how did our schools get this way?
Prior to the early 1900’s, education was a private practice which took place in private institutions or through home schooling.
“Any review of a typical elementary school arithmetic textbook printed before 1910 shows dramatically that students were learning mathematical skills that few of our current high school graduates know anything about.” -Paolo Lionni, author of The Leipzig Connection
Everything began to changed in 1903, when John D. Rockefeller created the General Education Board. The General Education Board was responsible for funding the American public school system, and provided over one hundred million dollars in 1903 alone, equivalent to 2.8 billion dollars today. The Rockefeller’s American public education system has been used as a model globally for more than a century. What does John D Rockefeller have to say about the goal of this system?
In 1953, Carroll Reece, Tennessee Congressman, along with research director Norman Dodd, and lawyer Rene Wormser, performed the first and only in-depth investigation into the activities of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations and their effect on American education.
Rene Wormser wrote that the Reece investigation, “leads one to the conclusion that there was, indeed, something in the nature of an actual conspiracy among certain leading educators in the United States to bring about socialism through the use of our school systems. A very powerful complex of foundations and allied organizations has developed over the years to exercise a high degree of control over education. Part of this complex, and ultimately responsible for it, are the Rockefeller and Carnegie groups.“
They have shaped the world’s education system since, and their intention is clear.
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill: “Schools have not necessarily much to do with education. They are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.”
British philosopher and elitist Committee of 300 member, Bertrand Russell, in his 1951 book “The Impact of Science on Society,” wrote, “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”
Karl Marx, the co-founder of communism, wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “The education of all children, from the moment they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
After your 13 years of compulsory indoctrination, we are told that we must attend even more schooling to have any chance at success.
And that schooling cost a whole lot of money.
According to Generation Opportunity, university graduates are entering the job market saddled with an average $33,000 in student loan debt.
But it leads to the best jobs right? You might be surprised to know that over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 (that’s MILLION) Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree
This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees. “Can you go clean that bathroom again, Dr?”
So what is college all about?
Noam Chomksy on the state of the college education system: “I quoted the Tri-Lateral Commission view of the educational system: namely, it’s a system of indoctrination of the young. And I think that’s correct; it’s a system of indoctrination of the young. The educational system is supposed to train people to be obedient, conformist, not think too much, do what your told, stay passive, don’t cause any crisis of democracy, don’t raise any questions, and so on. That’s basically what the system is about.”
You’d think if it was this bad, it’d be free, right?
Americans borrow almost $90 billion/year to attend college. About 2/3 of college students require loans to make it through, and a typical undergraduate leaves school with over $33,000 in student loan debt, $60,000 for graduate students. Student-loan holders can garnish a borrower’s wages, tax returns, Social Security, and disability incomes - without a court order.
When it’s all said and done, many students end up owing 2 to 4 times the original amount borrowed. Student loans are the only type of loan in U.S. history to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy (except in very rare cases.)
From grade-school to college, school is indoctrination. And a place no child should ever be.
This was gonna be longer, but I ran out of time.
“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.” — George Bernard Shaw
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