Underground History of American Education: Prabhupada was right about the 'slaughter

[krsna]

Objectives of modern education

 

 

Srila Prabhupada has described modern education as <font color="red"> "the slaughter house of youth." </font color> For an eye opening look at the objectives of modern education visit <font color="blue"> The Underground History of American Education </font color> where John T. Gatto, an award winning teacher of 30 years experience, exposes the purpose of mass forced schooling and proves that Srila Prabhupada was right (again).

 

Excerpt:

 

 

The Business of Schooling

 

 

Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.

 

 

 

In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.

 

 

 

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

 

 

 

Extract-

 

Prologue:

 

Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!

 

Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.

 

Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I’ve seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I’d admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That’s why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn’t your own little Janey or mine.

 

Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It’s called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.

 

I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn’t go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.

 

 

 

In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:

 

Gives Jane’s car a ticket before the meter runs out.

Throws away Jane’s passport application after Jane leaves the office.

Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca’s apartment from Jane’s while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.

All the above.

You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?

 

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

 

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?

 

One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don’t have opportunity to know those things. How did this happen?

 

Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child’s mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn’t any.

 

The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child’s name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn’t build a home without some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child’s mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.

 

Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.

 

If you can’t be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?

 

What exactly is public about public schools? That’s a question to take seriously. If schools were public as libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the time. Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction has spanned many decades. Only in Orwell’s Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin doctors of the twentieth century such as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising combines, is there anything public about public schools.

 

[govindarupini]

I believe that every parent who has children in the public school system, or plans on sending them, would find any of John Taylor Gatto's books very useful in informing them on what kind of association they are placing their children in. You owe it to your children to at least be open enough to investigate. Too many are brain-washed to automatically think "there is no other alternative, that is is just what you do with your kids to give them a good education."

 

Being a teacher within the system himself for thirty years, one will find that he is not just some conspiracy theory kook, but well educated on the subject. The man is brilliant.

 

He does give credit to those teachers who are trying their utmost to make the best use of a bad bargin.

 

The first book I read of his was "Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" The book may bring you to tears. I have also read "The Underground History of American Education", " A Different Kind of Teacher - Solving the Crisis of American Schooling."

 

Govindarupini dd

 

 

[Guest guest]

Boy you have hit a nerve, while we have home schooled our children and given them the stories of Krsna book, they are now teenage kids going to public school, they dissasociate them selves fron nonsense kids that do not wish to hear about Krsna.

 

Those kids that are curious about Krsna culture, they tell.

 

So are they in school for an education or is it Krsnas plan for them to preach the life they live by example ?

 

So keep the kids at home for formidible years then let them loose on society at least they will have some amunition against Kali.

 

We have no doubt that children taught in the security and comfort of home for those first years about Krsna consciousness will have a huge advantage in their spiritual life, even though they too must struggle with this balance.