Haven't Posted Anything With Him For a While

Gatto's Thesis

Echoed by others -- NY Post: US education model creates assembly-line workers by Kyle Smith

Complementarian Loners: Death by Pedagogy: A Teacher’s Polemic Against Institutional Learning

The post provides the embedded video for the following lecture by John Taylor Gatto:

5 hours of John Taylor Gatto

(via Complementarian Loners)

The Ultimate History Lesson_ A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto


Parts 2, 3, 4, 5

Plus there are the following:




John Taylor Gatto on Compulsary Education and Permanent Childhood

Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt: The Secret History of Western Education - alt

"Make good choices."

Begun on 2/5/12 at 8:28 P.M.

This is part of a new behavioral modification program implemented in the last few years at at least one school in a particular district. Actually I think I have heard this said in another district, too.

Making good choices might is same as making smart choices - it requires the virtue of prudence. One needs to learn how to choose in accordance with ends, and to set goals for one's self. But is it possible to develop prudence when the child hasn't attained the age of reason yet?

Internalizing standards may require, beyond outward conformity, the understanding the reasons for them. But it is not apparent to me that for children below a certain age that this is a better method than "traditional" discipline and its emphasis on obedience. ("Stop talking" versus "You need to learn in order to do well, go to college, accomplish x, y, z.") In fact, it may be worse, in so far as the reasons offered are the goods/goals of mass education and the associated goods/goals of the modern industrial political economy. At one district the expectation that the students will go to college is strengthened. For example, teachers are encouraged to display their degrees in their classroom.

This approach at behavior modification does not imply the lack of discipline or punishments, usually referred to as "consequences" for poor behavior. The same set of non-corporal punishments are available to reinforce making the "right" choices and that line of moral thinking. (Keep in mind that academic success is gauged by performance in the modern classroom - there are few alternatives, especially for boys. How are many children not being set up for failure and destruction of true self-esteem?)

Do the "creators" of this method appeal to some sort of psychological or scientific basis for such an approach to behavior modification? Has it been incorporated into child psychology/child education classes for the M. Ed? We are aware of how the insights incorporated into tradition and "common sense" wisdom regarding children has been discarded in favor of scientific pretense.

A great song for the commute to work.



I've had too much exposure to John Taylor Gatto and the like... A review of his first eye-opening book.

Meanwhile, some sad news about SGA, via Rorate Caeli: FSSP to Close St. Gregory's Academy.

I think the speculation over at RC (though it is supposedly based on "inside" sources) might be off. As far as I know, it has been difficult making the school financially viable for some time.

Items of Interest, 25 October 2011

John Médaille has a comment about the note on financial reform issued yesterday.
Local Economies of Care by Lewis McCrary
Rod Dreher, If not world government, then what?
Thomas Peters, Pope Benedict Calls For “Central World Bank” … Only He Didn’t. Here’s Why.

An interview with Richard Aleman (French)

Rod Dreher, No Chinese Good Samaritans
James Howard Kunstler offers a contrast between Europeans and Uhmericans: Jet-lagged and Ragged
Farming:
Seeds of Freedom Trailer

Seeds of Freedom - Trailer from The ABN and The Gaia Foundation on Vimeo.

TEDxDirigo - Roger Doiron - A Subversive Plot: How to Grow a Revolution in Your Own Backyard

Kitchen Gardeners International

Where does permaculture now sit within Transition?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s foreword to ‘The Transition Companion’ by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (EB)
the book

The Greenhorns

Happy Food Day

A Field Guide to Closing Your Bank Account
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR AND JOSHUA FRANK, Occupy The System
The United States’ 65-Year debt bubble by Gail Tverberg (EB)
A Conversation with Chris Martenson
Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - 11:00am - 12:15pm

(I don't know if a transcript will be posted.)

Heather Franzese - Changing How You Think About Clothes


Diet and Health:
Ask Mark Sisson! by Underground Wellness (mp3)

Listen to internet radio with Underground Wellness on Blog Talk Radio

The LLVLC Show (Episode 509): Vegan-Turned-Omnivore Heather Mamatey And ‘Make It Paleo’ Authors Bill Staley And Hayley Mason (mp3)

A 1-Day MovNat Workshop in Palo Alto
($200...)

Education:
John Taylor Gatto, Speech to the Vermont Homeschooling Conference


From: The Best Colleges

Don’t EVEN Get Me Started, Mythical Bootstraps College Student

Steve Jobs:
A Computer Icon on Life, Death, and Apple
Steve, Myself, and I: The Big Story of a Little Prefix

Catholic:
Gregorian chanting reduces blood pressure, stress
NCRegister: Pornography Addiction Documented
Rhode Island: Concert: Great music in a sacred space

One of those politicians in the know who has no choice?

A reference to Damien Perrotin's latest blog post, to which I linked here.

Not only did Jerry Brown interview Ivan Illich, he also had John Taylor Gatto on his radio program. Did he learn nothing from these two men? If he did, it hasn't had an impact on his term as governor. No education reform, no push for sustainability, no discussion of a more humane political economy. Is he just a professional politican pretending to be idealistic? Or does he feel trapped by the system?

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto

The essay, which is different from his "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher," though it shares much of the same content. Link from a commentor to Elusive Wapiti's Article Review: Lessons from the Underground History of American Education (which was first published at The Spearhead - I posted a notice about that.)

Elusive Wapiti, Some Extracted Lessons from The Underground History of American Education

Hawaiian Libertarian: Valedictorian: "I have successfully shown that I was the best slave."

The text of the speech by Erica Goldson at Coxsackie-Athens High School on June 25, 2010. (scribd)

The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto

Against School! - John Taylor Gatto

How public education cripples our kids, and why

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States … and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

This is an abridged version of the essay, "Against School."

History of the Purposeful Degradation of Schools in the U.S (Alex Jones interviews John Taylor Gatto)

J. T. Gatto interviewed by Lennart Mogren, Sweden, March 2003

2 from John Gatto are available from New Society Publishers: Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction