Originally posted by skippytjc
Possibly the biggest conspiracy of our time?
I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again, but if there is a conspiracy in education, it's a conspiracy of apathy. No dark cabal of
leaders saying "This, this is what we can do to create more sheeple this year!" but rather thousands of individuals, working alone or in small
groups, to keep students docile so the day goes smoother. Teachers, parents, counselors, administrators, health-workers are all involved, each doing
a small part to keep kids calm, to keep them from asking disruptive (and as an unfortunate consequence, challenging) questions, to keep them in their
seats during class and not up and running around.
Why do I ask this question?
Because we were designed to be stupid. More specifically, Americans have been designed to be stupid.
Not quite, "docile" would be a more appropriate term. Under the educational doctrine of docility, the ideal student would be like Ghandi: quiet,
but attentive, intelligent and persuasive. Unfortunately for us all the first goal, quiet, is relatively easy to achieve (through drugs, social
engineering, etc), but the latter is difficult enough that it's all too often easy enough for a teacher to say to themselves "Well, I've got them
calmed dow this year, next year's teacher ought to be able to get the "attentive, intelligent, and persuasive" parts down for them.
The USA’s current school system was designed to suppress creativity and free thought. DESIGNED THAT WAY! The very people who put together
America’s school system did so with the sole intent to keep the classes separated and to supply the industrial revolution with content, conforming
workers. This was actually planned and it’s the same system we use today.
Again, kind of. The modern American school system is, indeed, a product of the Industrial Revolution's thinking: namely, that assembly lines are the
best way to produce any product. Since then, we've had patch after patch applied until our system is now the equivalent of that old late-70's El
Camino you see at the supermaket that's as much Duct Tape and Bondo as it is sheet metal.
The push for education in the US was, at least in part, designed, though it was more of a social-darwinist school of thought. It was believed, at the
time that public education was starting in the US, that educaiton would allow the lower classes to lift themselves from their "shallow little
worlds" and into the enlightened thinking of the upper classes. That if we could just educate everyone, the social evils of the time would
disappear. We still see a lot of that in our society today and it's this thinking, at least in part, that's caused teachers and schools to take on
more and more responsibility for children's upbringing.
This is not my opinion, this is fact and I will prove it to you.
But before I do, I want to share a portion of an 8th grade final exam from 1895 with you:
As was said, this is a bit of a disingenuous tangent here. The fact that the subjects taught in school have changed, that formalized grammar has
decreased in importance in the Western world, for example, is not indicitive of a lack of quality in education. Indeed, seen independant of other
information it could be said that we'd merely eliminated the chaff to allow our schools to teach children the truly important things. That's not to
say I buy into that fully, but getting into a "who's got the bigger educational willie" contest is a little silly.
Melvil Dewey did the Dewey Decimal System.
John
Dewey was the educator.
[/nitpick (sorry, my wife's a librarian and wouldn't let me pass on that
]
Yeah, he said that. “…maintenance of the proper social order…” that’s a gem huh?
How about this one from the Dean of Education at Stanford Elwood Cubberly in 1905:
…schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and
the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."
Yep, sounds pretty accurate for the time. They
did see students as raw materials, little bundles of potential that were pretty much useless in
their natural state, but that could be shaped to society's advantage. If you look at the time, you'll see all sorts of odd social engineering
attempts taking place. Heck, if you look throughout human history you'll see such attempts. John Dewey et all were just using the most up-to-date
technology of their time --the techniques of the Industrial Revolution-- just as previous social engineers had used other techniques such as religion,
war, clan-structure and so on to reinfoce their own views of how the world should be "Made Better™"
Who are these guys you ask? These are the very guys who created and implemented today’s school system. The one that ALL American’s in the
last century was educated with.
The system was designed to produce a proportionate number of “worker bee’s” and limit the amount of highly educated free thinkers.
Yep, that's what the folks at the time thought was necessary to have the highest proportion of happy people. We do the same thing now, even most
so-called enlightened folks in the US, we just export the "worker bees" mold to people in other countries.
Am I over thinking this? These quotes don’t prove anything you say? Well read this one from William Torrey Harris, the actual US
Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906:
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an
accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
Harris all but states it as fact that 99% of students are “automata” by design! This is the very man responsible for the educational system. Not
convinced yet that the US government wanted its masses to be uneducated robots? Would you believe the President himself?
President Woodrow Wilson:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal
education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
I don’t know how else to spell this out for you. The very people who are responsible for creating and implementing the current United States school
system designed it to keep the majority uneducated.
Not uneducated, educated in different things. Look at the state of the world in the late 19th and early 20th century. The US did not have the
infrastructure to support the large number of highly-educated people that we have today. The US, at that time, was an up-and-coming manufacturing
powerhouse and the palin truth was we needed workers who knew how to do the physical side of that. There were no robots at the time, there was no
fast-and-cheap global transport of goods to allow us to oursource our workforce, we needed Americans who were physically mechanically adept in order
to get, and maintain, our prosperity.
Let’s revisit that 1895 test. Think about how hard that exam is today, for anybody, let alone a 13 year old. But the reality is that this
was a typical exam
PRIOR to the implementation of today’s educational system. Educators back then had one priority: To teach you and make
you smarter.
When you go to complete local control of education, though, this doesn't hold. The purpose of education, in such a system, is
whatever the local
school board wants it to be. For some this will be the increase of knowledge. Others may want a minimum level of education, just enough to
maintain the social mores present. Still others will find education to be a frivolity and cease to fund it at all, leaving it up to each individual
family (or group of families) to fund any education for their children. While I'll agree that our federal Department of Education has grown too
large and powerful, I do think there is a need for some presence on the federal level, if only to maintain a
bare minimum set of standards for
US schools. Pure anarchy may look good on paper, but ask anyone in Somalia how well it works out in a practical application.
But as a collective, too many smart people didn’t serve the interest of the country as a whole. So a system to churn out the appropriate
percentage of “worker bee’s” was implemented.
Not exactly. "As a collective, too many thinkers and not enough doers didn't serve the interest of the country as a whole." would be a more
accurate way to state that. If everyone's drawing blueprints for the Next Big Invention, but nobody knows how to actually work the smelter, you have
just as much a problem as if everyone's a worker and there's no one designing new things. It's the converse to the problem Rand raised in Atlas
Shrugged.
Find me one college level professor, from any institution, that can score a 100% on that 8th grade exam in the times allotted and without a
calculator or PC. You cannot. Because they were designed to be stupid, just like you and me.
Again, not so. Taking a college professor will get you someone with a highly specialized field of knowledge. This is kind of like asking a software
engineer to explain, in scientific detail, why suspension bridges work without recourse to a computer, and then using his lack of ability to explain
as proof that American engineers are incompetant.
The test is using different criteria than even our best educational institutions now use. Not "better" criteria, "different" criteria. Sure, I
can't tell you the volume of a bushel. How many of those 19th century 8th graders could, for example, tell you how to figure a subnet, or how many
bits in a byte. "If I have a flash media drive capable of storing 1 Gigabyte, how many 3-bit files could fit on it?"
