Exhausting John Gatto

Twenty years ago, John Taylor Gatto (at great personal expense) organized an educational conference/event at Carnegie Hall. The purpose was to give publicity to *educational alternatives* - in other words alternatives to government and government-facsimile private schools.

Of course the media ignored him and the financial interests of Big Education did what they could to sabotage the affair.

Here are a couple of excerpts I saw fit to jot down:

Our form of schooling creates an abundance of social pathologies and contradicts the way children actually learn - sacrificing human potential to an obsession with hierarchy, order, routine, surveillance, and the creation of lifelong dependence on "expert" authority. This latter function of schooling has come to support many parasitic forms of employment in our economy. Bertrand Russell once called American schooling the most extreme social experiment in Western history, a mechanism to realize Plato’s Republic. (p23)

Meanwhile, something even more sinister was taking place - a fact we learned to our horror two weeks before the show. In the financing of such events, fund-raisers regularly call on sources well known to be supportive of such things. In the case of "The Exhausted School," three such sources had taken the lead to contact Odysseus Group! Nothing could be more promising than that, it seemed. We were wrong. Each of our potential angels and a whole spread of others as yet untried were reached by some unknown agency and warned away from Carnegie Hall.

Who was doing this? Through some adroit detective work and drawing on favors owed, our volunteer fund-raiser disclosed her astonishing conclusion: It was the president of a prestigious foundation on Vanderbilt Avenue, she said, an institution which claimed hegemony in school reform! She confronted him, she continued, but he denied even knowing about Carnegie Hall. That was the clincher. She produced a photocopy of an informational inquiry about the event written by the president himself months before to a friend of hers!

Nothing could be done, of course, but press on. Eventually 1,024 people paid their way into Carnegie Hall in spite of the media blackout, the absence of advertising, and a desperate attempt on the part of "reformers" to destroy our attempt to establish a grass roots voice...(p24-25)

An education gives you the power to make your own decisions and a schooling teaches you to follow the lead of other people - not the same thing at all. (p27)

We live in a time of great school crisis, and that crisis is linked to a greater social crisis in the general community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore. Without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present.

We live in networks, not communities. Everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy, just as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among races and social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through the subway trains begging, and sleep upon the streets

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 26 years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes any more that scientists are made in science classes, or politicians in civics classes, or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery because thousands of human, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides, and even as administrators. But the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - by which I mean it has no conscience.

How on earth did we ever accept the idea a government had the right to tell us where to go to school? How did we ever come to believe the State should tell our children what to think? (p29-30)

Today, in 2012, it almost seems foolish to rent Carnegie hall for $50,000+ (some of which came out of Gatto's pocket!) in hopes of getting a message out, or starting a revival-type movement.

But back then, recall Al Gore's internet wasn't invented, there was no YouTube, no social networking, and thus no real cost-efficient way to spread *ideas*.

I've shared the rest of my excerpts on this Google Doc - The Exhausted School.

I was elated to discover this book. While it's far from his best work - being his earlier/earliest(?) work....I just can't get enough of Gatto!

But be sure to read his other books first, particularly - The Underground History of Education - which you can read online, for free. Click the link.

Heresy Against The Church Of Schoology

Always worth reading and re-reading, here's former government school teacher and homeschooling patron saint John Taylor Gatto and his resignation letter:

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.

That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology. It’s a religious notion, School is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.

Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be "re-formed." It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work.

As someone who's often preaching the pull-out-of-school creed to dissatisfied and ambitious parents alike, I'm continually impressed with the depth of Gatto's wisdom and the clarity of his argumentation.

One very common push-back I hear is that, "I can't teach my kids algebra, physics, chemistry, etc..."

It's BS of course. Tiger Woods' father couldn't hit a golf ball a country mile; Bill Gates' mother didn't know a thing about programming computers.

If you can READ, you can find and marshal the resources to give your children an education far superior to the 25-on-1, standardized school experience. ENABLING - that's all that's required.

Gatto asserts:

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard.

Indeed!

And I do like the metaphor comparing failure to toe the school line with *heresy* - a sentiment all homeschooling parents have to brush off, often.

Me? While my wife is low-key in social settings about how we educate our children...

I on the other hand initiate the *school conversation* and wear the Scarlet Letter proudly on my chiseled chest!

Another Gatto Gem, Unearthed

The following is a quote from homeschooling patron saint, John Taylor Gatto:

When Bill Clinton was nominated by the Democratic Party for the presidency in 1991, I think that was July 17th, the New York Times printed his acceptance speech for the nomination. The speech ended with the tribute to a college professor who had been Clinton's mentor at Georgetown. Clinton said that this professor had seen the future more clearly than anyone. His name was Caroll Quigley.

Well, you could knock me over with a feather, Mary, because I read constantly and anybody who is worth knowing about I should at least have heard of. I never heard of this guy. So I went to the public library, and there was exactly one book in the files by Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. I ordered it; it was out. It never came back in. I travel constantly, so a few days later, I was in San Francisco, and I went to the San Francisco Library, and Quigley was in the files, book stolen. I went to Dallas, Quigley was in the files, book stolen. I made seven or eight other tries to get it, with the same result.

All of a sudden I'm beginning to smell a big rat. Here's the future president of the United States paying tribute to a man whose book is unavailable in the United States.

Some dentist out in California heard me on a radio show, saying that I was looking for the book. He called me up and said that he had a copy and I bought it from him.

Well, I saw why the book was unavailable. Quigley claims to be the only man ever allowed access to the private files of the group that has taken this project under their wing. We call it the Counsel on Foreign Relations in this country, but in fact there are 23 bases worldwide. Quigley said that he was allowed to read all their papers from its inception, and that the CFR had a clear, organized, rational plan to eliminate war and to make life - ah - efficient.

Quigley's book was printed in 1966 by Macmillan, hardly one of your conspiratorial publishing houses. In his book, Quigley said that he approved of the plan; what he didn't approve of was the secrecy.

But right before he died, about ten years ago, Quigley gave a series of lectures at Georgetown, called the Oscar Iden lectures. In the Iden lectures, Quigley said that he no longer accepted this as a moral or a decent thing to do, and that we had to take up arms against this plan.

So what we have is upper-level documentation by a major scholar, who in fact is paid tribute to by the current president of the United States in his acceptance speech. I was already started on the path of tracking down these players, but Quigley took me much, much farther than I could have gone alone. With Quigley's clues to what was happening, I was able myself to assemble from mainline scholarship, again, not from conspiracy books, a real outline of what had happened, and in particular what was happening in the schools. We're trying to make a film about this now...

While I found that item in particular interesting, the rest of the interview is much better and well-worth reading. It's especially insightful on how to raise animated, driven children - even for those outside the homeschooling world. So click the link!

For more on at least the excerpted quote, see:

Children of the UN?

Unity, A Ruse

On The Elite

And for my master John Taylor Gatto link, click here.

Book Rec - The Tipping Point

Okay. Since Outliers was sooooo good, I figured I had to check out Malcolm Gladwell's prior work.

The Tipping Point was decent - and only took me 1.5 days to fly through.

You can read the outline on the above link; in a nutshell, it's about fads, trends, and the pathology of *contagion* and what he calls *epidemics*.

For me, the most notable part was his chapter on the birth of Sesame Street. The show's creators, back in the 1960s, used revolutionary techniques to capture the attention of pre-schoolers. While nobody dares bash the *intentions* of Big Bird, Jim Henson, and the gang (ABCs and 123s), it seems to me there was an unintended and possibly more pronounced side effect.

Sesame Street did all of the heavy lifting. They had children watch the shows in laboratory settings where scientists tried to measure what images, formats, and approaches would literally keep their eyes glued to the screen: 3 minute segments were found to be optimal, no adult altercating on-screen, etc. Then, people left the show and applied that know-how to, well, let's just say to shows more concerned with addicted viewers than early literacy.

John Gatto, in his work, mentions a few times that the makers of children's color TV programming knew precisely what they're doing. And he says it with palpable disdain.

Running Out Of Gatto Books...

I just finished John Taylor Gatto's - A Different Kind of Teacher.

I was a bit skeptical of reading it, being one of his earlier works. But it turned out to be pretty decent.

Below find the passages I deemed worthy of my transcribed notes.

IMO, the first one about *economic consensus* wins the prize:

P75-76

The sheer craziness of what we do to our children should have been sufficient cause to stop it once the lunacy was manifest in increased social pathology, but a crucial development forestalled corrective action: schooling became the biggest business of all. Suddenly there were jobs, titles, careers, prestige, and contracts to protect. As a country we’ve never had the luxury of a political or religious or a cultural consensus. As a synthetic state, we’ve had only economic consensus; unity is achieved by making everyone want to get rich, or making them envy those who are.

P81-82

And finally, the library has real books, not school books. Its volumes are not written by collective pens or picked by politically correct screening committees. Real books conform only to the private curriculum of each writer, not to the invisible curriculum of some collective agenda. The one exception to this is children’s books – but no sensible child ever reads those things, so the damage from them is minimal.

Real books are deeply subversive of collectivization. They are the best known way to escape herd behavior, because they are vehicles transporting the reader into deep caverns of absolute solitude where nobody else can visit. No two people ever read the same great book. Real books disgust the totalitarian mind because they generate uncontrollable mental growth – and it cannot be monitored.

P95

Only one person in ten reads more than one book a year after they graduate from our schools according to the American Librarian’s Association.

P100-101

School’s theoreticians do not believe in free will, holding instead that people are mechanisms, and that disaster would follow the release of central controls over children. From this base of ideas flows automatically certain structures of schooling known to be harmful. If you believe in free will and a moral universe, then the schooling you design will attempt to promote self-reliance, compassion, and free choice. If you believe that families are the basic institution of human life, then the schooling you design will have the intention to strengthen bonds of family. But if you believe that human beings are imperfect machines, wound up like bad clocks, then school becomes a field in which to implant habits, to install controls over group behavior, to form synthetic family associations in the hope of superseding real families. School becomes a place to teach everyone they cannot trust themselves or anybody else except the voice of authority.

Twentieth-century American government schools are compulsory behavior clinics with little interest in scholarship, as their own internal workings betray. They are the result of an ancient belief among mobile aristocracies, like our own Puritan classes, that the mass of humanity cannot be trusted, and is, indeed, dangerous.

...From a foundation of mistrust built in kindergarten, a foundation whose central tenet is that children do not learn but have to be taught, that children must be tricked into accepting responsibility by motivating them with worthless prizes, worthless praise, and plenty of good old-fashioned humiliation, from such a wellhead many hideous things crawl out naturally. From a foundation of mistrust, a technology of security and behavior-modification grows, a belief that young people must be shaped by state, not by their own families, cultures, and communities.

P104

...did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before the age of seven? The hardheaded Swedes don’t want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on taking a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers.

P113

According to research published by Christopher Jencks, the famous sociologist, and others as well, the quality of school which any student attends is a very bad predictor of later success, financial, social, or emotional. On the other hand the quality of family life is a very good predictor. That would seem to indicate a national family policy directly spending on the home, not the school.

P173-174

When English Puritans reached Salem in 1629, there were no Anglican officials present to certify their choice of leaders, so they took that responsibility – illegally – into their own hands. That simply, yet revolutionary, act transferred enormous political power to ordinary churchgoers, whose sole qualification to wield such power was that they had joined a congregation that took religion seriously....This became the only nation in history where ordinary citizens could take issue with authority without being beaten, jailed, or killed.

Congregations were never universal in focus, but always intensely local. Members knew their fellow congregants by name and family history. These were not mere networks….And if a congregation had a problem, it would not accept outside intervention unless all other possibilities had been exhausted.

Were some of these congregations bad? Sure, some of them were horrible. But at least the damage stopped at the boundaries of a single church and community. That’s the difference between a Congregational model and a state-church system, or indeed any systematic form of universal governance: a system won’t let you walk away, whereas a congregation will say, "Good-bye and good riddance."

We are far from a time when we trusted ourselves to run our own lives without surveillance. Since the Civil War, nearly a century and a half of increasingly suffocating "expert" intervention in our schools and elsewhere has left us thinking that, to decide anything important, we have to call in Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale, or the Carnegie Corporation – all honorable institutions, but also outsiders, strangers. As a consequence, our children have no goal to aim for apart from the approval of these official strangers. I suspect such expert interventions are one reason why families are falling apart. How can children respect their parents when those sad souls are regularly contradicted by various representatives of the state? Parents have been made childlike by this "Expert Procedure," just as the Puritans were given full adulthood by the Salem Procedure.

The Salem Procedure is completely antagonistic to the current model because it consists in lay people picking their own experts and keeping them on a very short tether. It also draws from the well of common-sense wisdom found among people who actually work, rather than talk, for a living...

P184

I may seem to have strayed from the topic of American spirituality, but I haven’t, really. Until we understand that the factual contents of our minds – the "truths" upon which we base our decisions – have for the most part been inserted there by others whose motives are not our own, we will never fully appreciate the unique gift of American Christian spirituality. For it teaches that the answers to our problems lie within us, that we are the center of the universe, and that wisdom cannot be learned in school, but only through accepting the burden of work, learning the lessons pain teaches, sorting out right and wrong for ourselves, and coming to terms with aging and death. If these are our spiritual compasses, we need no rulers or experts to tell us how to live.

American spirituality offers a set of practical guidelines, street lamps for the village of our lives. Although the focus is on the individual, nobody is asked to wander aimlessly. What constitutes a good life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, compassion, acceptance of loss, preparation for death. In this neglected tradition, no teacher does your work. You must do it for yourself.

P188

At the turn of the twentieth century a profound social thinker in France named George Simmel wrote a remarkable book called The Philosophy of Money. In it, Simmel, one of the great creative theorists of this century, said that money contained a powerful internal contradiction built into the foundations of its abstract existence: by robbing things of their innate identity and replacing that core identity with a money identity, by making everything interchangeable with money, money often cheapened things and removed their significance! Simmel said that whenever genuine personal qualities like service were offered for money, that the pricing of these things inevitably trivialized what had been priced.

Simmel continued: "Whenever genuine personal values have to be offered for money, one finds that a loosening, a loss of quality in individual life takes place."

Now think again about the meaning of all those American lawsuits, think of all the broken promises they represent, the counterfeit "services" rendered. Is it just barely possible that the shift after World War II to what is called a "service" economy is part of the reason for our visible unhappiness as a nation? Is it just barely possible that when most of us don’t accept the obligation of service to each other, performed freely, as part of the social contract, but instead assign the job to hired hands, that rather than the joy Solomon promised, the payoff might be its opposite, misery?

P194

Schools desperately need a vision of their own purpose. At present they are exactly what many suspect, they are government jobs for children; and the worst kind of government jobs – the make-work kind, not really jobs at all.

There is nothing, or very little, to do in school. Our elite high school texts are on the level of fifth grade readers from 160 years ago, in the time before we got compulsory schooling. And dumbing down the work isn’t some sinister conspiracy, it has become more and more a necessity as generations of well-schooled children succeed themselves and become parents.

So the damage is cumulative, and it is fast becoming insupportable. Look around you at our society. We have created a whirlpool of addictions that children and grown children use to avoid confronting themselves with their own uselessness. We are reluctant to face the truth because it acts as a mirror, revealing more than we can face about the real source of our difficulties. We have forced children to be irresponsible for 12 years. It is no wonder they dislike themselves and us, and no wonder then cannot recover. Cut a man’s legs off as a boy and they will not grow back when he is a man.

P204-205

At mid-century we reached a point where we could so little bear intimate contact with living things in their messy reality as compared to the clean simplicity of machines that we became willing to lock old people away with strangers, to lock up our mothers and fathers, to create a good investment opportunity in warehousing for the old. We completed a complex circle in doing that, a circle begun a century earlier when we locked our young people away in warehouses with other strangers. Does it matter that our parents die among strangers and our children live penned up by strangers? Does that have an effect on the quality of life left theoretically "free" in the middle? What do you think? The assertion that isolation chambers for the young and old are an advance in human society doesn’t square with any observed reality. It, too, is part of the great nonthought-of received ideas – like memorizing the significance of the space program.

P210-211

Learn to forgive and you enter an arena of spectacular affirmation. Begin by forgiving yourself, then forgive your family. You will have established a foundation for self-respect and categorical love by doing that – the kind that isn’t given or removed by the logic of performance, but given freely, without conditions. If you affirm forgiveness you have the secret of eternal renewal so clearly described in the Christian Gospels. When you love people who hurt you, the effect is transcendental. You swell up with the power of being fully human and truly free. My own family taught me this in many ways; now forgiveness is one of the affirmations I struggle to practice. When I succeed I feel blessed. You might, too. It’s worth a try.

To be real you need to celebrate your own history, humble and tormented as it might be, and the history of your own parents and grandparents, howsoever that history be marked by scars and mistakes. It is the only history you will ever have; reject it and you reject yourself. All the rest is the sickness of fantasy. Cherish what is yours; protect it; defend it; never accept the false evaluations of outsiders in regard to it. Whether your family is the best or the worst doesn’t matter very much. Being first or last at anything truly doesn’t matter, and your case will be hopeless as long as you think it does.

P214

Beginning with Aristotle and the Greeks the Western world saw the study of how to speak and listen effectively as the quintessential human art. They called this pursuit "rhetoric," and though the meaning has degenerated in contemporary dictionaries into "the art of persuasion," that’s an accountant’s way to regard this central and peculiarly human undertaking. Korzybski and the general semanticists in this century, came to see the constellations of rhetoric as a sine qua non of sanity itself. Without accurate maps of each other we are condemned to wander in an infuriating wilderness.

Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, and other great names in the pantheon we call Renaissance humanists found an intimate link between rhetoric and moral growth. If you can’t figure out the instrumentality of how the other guy is talking, you can’t benefit fully from his experience or help him much with your own. However socially poised you appear to be, you are condemned to be one of the isolani, known only to yourself, knowing only yourself.

Managing Us Cuckoos

So I've just completed that David Albert book of essays. Here's an excerpt from one of them which discusses homeschooling icon John Taylor Gatto.

The Success Of Public Education

John's first work was a set of Monarch Notes. Some of you may remember these from high school, a way to get by in English class without doing the required reading! At any rate, Gatto's first book was first published in 1975, a Monarch Notes guide to the late Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

John related to me once, after affixing his signature on my copy -- with handwriting only a hair more legible than my own (we must both have had Mr. Lewis in the 6th grade and still not recovered from the experience) that the Monarch Notes guide, still in print after 26 years, has actually sold hundreds of thousands of copies, making it by far his most widely read work. But all John ever got out of it was a Burmese cat. If you ever get the opportunity to attend one of his talks, make sure to ask him about it.

Anyway, this Monarch Notes guide - the only book of Gatto's likely to be read by students undergoing their slow death in what passes for "educational institutions" these days - is an incendiary work. And not only because of its black-and-red cover.

Kesey's magnificent novel, as well as the excellent movie featuring a young Jack Nicholson (not recommended until you've read the book!), is the story of a rebel - one Randall Patrick McMurphy -- who finds himself (or rather finds a way to get himself) inside a state psychiatric institution in the 1960s. Once within, he discovers himself bound by a web of rules, procedures, and protocols - really, kid gloves -- behind which stands an iron fist of violence and repression, all designed of course for "the patient's own good." In scene after scene, McMurphy probes against the boundaries of the forces that stand behind the institution - "the Combine" -- which comes to be symbolized by "The Big Nurse" who controls the ward, and ultimately holds the fate of each of the patients in her hands. Let me not ruin the book for you. I suggest you go out and read it, alongside your teenager if you have one, or, if you've read it once before, read it again, with new eyes.

Kesey's novel takes place against a backdrop of relentless institutional conditioning. While meetings on the ward may seem to be democratically organized -- and while inmates - no, here they are called "patients - are urged toward accountability - one quickly realizes that there is no democracy at work in the asylum, and that accountability is a sham. Inmates are tracked, without their consent, into well-demarcated groups as acutes and chronics - and further subdivided into walkers, wheelers, and vegetables (we all do remember Bluebirds and Robins from first grade, don't we?) The highest value to the Combine is neither democracy nor accountability, but compliance, pure and simple, and its favorite strategem is divide and conquer. And if that doesn't work, there are always drugs. Hmm.

I doubt that a set of Monarch Notes has ever been heaped with literary praise before, but Gatto's are much deserving. His description of the Keseyan institutional world contained in this incendiary set of crib notes, (he even quotes Che Guevara - "Educate your enemy, don't kill him, for he is worth more to you alive than dead"), is as compelling as the novel itself. He describes the Combine that controls this little world as "an all-powerful, earth-girdling, brain-destroying association of technocrats...intent on building a world of precision, efficiency, and tidiness...a place where the schedule is unbreakable." "In such a world," writes John, "there is neither grief nor happiness; nobody dies - they only burn out and are recycled; actually, it is a rather safe place, everything is planned - there are neither risks nor surprises." Gatto continues that within this little world, "Words and meaningless routines insulate people from life itself, blind them to what is happening around them, and deaden the moral faculties." The defense to this charge, ironic of course as John notes, is that the Big Nurse delivers charity baskets to the poor. Pivotal to Kesey's novel, according to Gatto, "is the cataclysmic revelation that the inmates of the asylum are not committed but are there of their own free will." And the way they are controlled, ultimately, is through guilt, shame, fear, and belittlement. Double hmmm.

Wow! I read that book in high school. Yet I had no idea it was such a spot-on critique of the institution/classroom which assigned it. AND, I sincerely doubt my teacher did either.

Now for the exploitation of school *failure*:

And yet the idea that schools are failing didn't make any sense to me. After all, the schools are run by highly paid and educated public servants, hired by local elected school boards - my neighbors, staffed by people prepared in our graduate schools of education where they were, in turn, taught by faculty trained at our elite private universities such as Yale or the University of Chicago. Teachers are honored, school administrators with salaries well in excess of $100,000 receive merit-pay raises, the school boards continue to get elected, the electorate continues to vote to give the schools more money, the graduate schools of education get bigger. If these are failing institutions, they sure have a funny way of showing it!

John provided, and continues to provide the key to understanding this conundrum. Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception. The system, perfected at places like the University of Chicago, Columbia Teachers College, Carnegie-Mellon, and Harvard, and funded by the captains of industry, was explicitly set up to ensure a docile, malleable workforce to meet the growing, changing demands of corporate capitalism -- "to meet the new demands of the 20th century," they would have said back then. The Combine (whoops, slipped again!) ensures a workforce that will not rebel (the greatest fear at the turn of the 20th century), and that will be physically, intellectually, and emotionally dependent upon corporate institutions for their incomes, self-esteem, and stimulation, and will learn to find social meaning in their lives solely in the production and consumption of material goods. We all grew up in these institutions and we know they work. They haven't changed much since the 1890s because they don't need to - they perform precisely as they are intended.

What do the captains of industry really care about? That public education be public. In other words, that we (and not they) pay for it. Corporate institutions have unloaded their basic training needs on to us, and we voluntarily pay to forge the chains of our own servitude.

So far, so good. But the obvious question that follows from this is, if educational institutions are so demonstrably successful, why are we always hearing about their failures? And here John might have provided the answer, for in his aborted career before becoming a New York City schoolteacher, with Monarch Notes a decade away and this edition of Dumbing Us Down almost four, Gatto was an advertising copyrighter, "a young fellow," (he writes in "The Green Monongahela"), "with a knack for writing thirty-second television commercials." The copywriter knows that to sell a product or service, one must create the perception of need, and the palpable feeling that this need can only be filled exclusively through the purchase of the product or service being sold. The simplistic notion that "our schools are failing" easily translates into a limitless demand for more resources for the institution and its supports -- for books, for teachers, for computers, for real estate (and hence book publishers, graduate schools of education, computer manufacturers, and real estate developers) -- and for more time -- more pre-school, more homework, longer school years, the end of recess, and semi- (and soon fully) compulsory summer schools. And to the copywriter's delight, it is a zero-sum game. Not only is there an endless stream of consumers with little or no institutional memory and absolutely insatiable demand, but the truth is that no matter how much is expended in the educational marketplace, 50% of the schools will remain "below average", with those branded as poor performers changing from year to year, and those above the mid-point fearing, above all, that they will fall into the abyss. And the copywriter has done his job for, it is universally believed, the only response to a fall into sub-mediocrity is to buy one's way out.

Can't Argue In An Inverted World, With Morons

So some Moron at the Washington Post just penned an intellectually bankrupt article on homeschooling. The absolute tripe that Big Media churns out these days is so deplorable I'm literally pained to read it.

Three Smart Rules for Home School Regulation

Homeschooling is the sleeping giant of the American education system. There are at least 1.7 million children being taught at home, a rough estimate because good data is hard to find and the number has been growing about 9 percent a year for the last decade. Home-schooling parents and their concerns don’t show up often in our debates over public schooling. They are too busy getting through the day, both making a living and teaching their children. We will likely hear more from them as they serve a larger and larger portion of the nation’s schoolchildren.

Some public school educators I know are uneasy about this. They don’t know home-schooling families well. They worry those kids are being ill-served by well-meaning but inexperienced parents....

WHOA right there!

Who the bleep put *public school educators* in charge of MY CHILDREN???

Given that most of them come from the second lowest quintile of academic performance themselves....the fact that they have ANY KIDS under their charge is scary enough.

Now they get an opinion on homeschoolers that should be weighed in possible homeschooling regulation????

Putting aside my personal homeschooling stance, this article's very premise is hollowed out of all logic.

This is what kills me. People today simply cannot think for themselves - of course, mostly on account of their Big Education upbringing.

At this moment, pols and pundits are arguing over which mortgage securities should be *bailed out* or made whole by newly minted currency. Meanwhile, the argument that Big Government has no place WHATSOEVER in the housing market can't even get an audience.

At this moment, pols, pundits, and narrow-brained doctors are arguing over big, super-big, or ginormous government run healthcare. Meanwhile, the intellectually superior notion that medicine would be completely fine on its own in a de-politicized market can't get any play either.

And, getting back to this ludicrous article, it's not enough for me or anyone else to wax indignant and assert that the government agents of Big Education have no dominion over the education of my children.

No, it's totally backwards.

It's me and the rest of us taxpayers who are in charge of *public school educators*!

And, not for anything, this *inversion of power*, and the havoc it would wreak, was predicted from the get-go.

From one of my favorite John Taylor Gatto excerpts:

In 1839, thirteen years before the first successful school compulsion law was passed in the United States, a perpetual critic of Boston Whig (Mann’s own party) leadership charged that pro-posals to erect German-style teacher seminaries in this country were a thinly disguised attack on local and popular autonomy. The critic Brownson allowed that state regulation of teaching licenses was a necessary preliminary only if school were intended to serve as a psychological control mechanism for the state and as a screen for a controlled economy. If that was the game truly afoot, said Brownson, it should be reckoned an act of treason.

"Where the whole tendency of education is to create obedience," Brownson said, "all teachers must be pliant tools of government. Such a system of education is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society but the thing is wholly inadmissible here." He further argued that "according to our theory the people are wiser than the government. Here the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give law to the government." He concluded that "to entrust government with the power of determining education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power of the master. The fundamental difference between the United States and Prussia has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters."

Gatto Documentary Forthcoming

John Taylor Gatto's long-hyped movie seems to be closer to fruition. Read his remarks:

I’m here to ask you to support the film, The Fourth Purpose, with money, ideas, work, and prayers, but without the money first, the rest of this airplane won’t fly. What we are after in this film is the destruction of the pernicious school myth, which has paralyzed social justice in the United States for a century. Schooling as we know it, is a powerful expression of the sickness of this society, not a cure for that sickness. While the myth lives, we will never revive the libertarian America most of us prefer in place of the present empire.

Click the link above and read the whole thing - particularly the part on 'social efficiency'. I just can't get enough of this guy!

Here is my master link to Gatto-referenced posts.

A Bit Of John Taylor Gatto

From pages 44-45 of Weapons of Mass Instruction:

....Far from PRODUCTION as an ideal, it was CONSUMPTION that had to be encouraged. School had to train in consumption habits: listening to others, moving on a bell or a horn signal without questioning, becoming impressionable - more accurately, gullible - in order to do well on tests. Kids who insisted on producing their own lives had to be humiliated publicly as a warning to others.

Producing yourself is the ultimate form of production. For many years America's promise to the rest of the world's peoples was that if they could only manage to get here, no feudal order would thwart that dream. But after the Civil War, the argument between entrepreneurial values - which inevitably celebrate open-source learning - and industrial values - by their nature feudal - was over.

When the smoke cleared fifty years later, the imitation sciences of pedagogy and psychology had been imported from northern Germany, pressed into service through the school institution to create a proletariat: family-less, landless people with only weak ties to religion, tradition, culture. Even the middle management and professional strata are best seen as proletariat, too - a professionalized proletariat - only lightly rooted in relationships to people, places, or principles.

To enlist public opinion behind this utopian transformation, a pathological state of youth, heretofore unrecognized by history, was designed by G. Stanley Hall of Johns Hopkins University. He called it ADOLESCENCE and debuted the condition in a huge two-volume study of that name, published in 1904. Trained in Prussia as behavioral psychologist Wilhelm Wundt's first assistant, Hall (immediately influential in school circles at the beginning of the 20th century) identified adolescence as a dangerously irrational state of human growth requiring psychological controls inculcated through schooling.

To see much of what I've written on John Taylor Gatto, click here.

Looking Ahead

Excuse the pic. My scanner is busted and these things never photograph well.

That's the backcover of a Kumon math book. Click graphic to enlarge. Right now my 4.5 year old son is on Grade 2 Subtraction which covers vertical subtraction and borrowing. Remember that?

Anyways, my ambitious plan is to do all of those books - up through Grade 6 Fractions - with Prince C-Nut within the next twelve months.

So he'll be approximately a full six years ahead of government school curricula before he's legally eligible for kindergarten!

It may sound like a lofty goal but remember that I was two years advanced in math with no parental boost whatsoever, AND that the schools have watered down their expectations even more in the past 30 years.

On another front, in a previous post I discussed the progress of Princess C-Nut and lamented that she may be getting neglected in the early on because she is a *second child*.

But today I started her on Uppercase Letters and noticed that my son hadn't done that book until he was about 9-10 months older.

And lastly, I'm happy to announce that yet another holdout friend of mine finally broke down.

Yesterday I received an email from him asking about how to get his kids started with the Kumon books.

So months of badgering, and blogging on the subject, by me finally paid off. Heck, just last week he was telling me that it was impossible for his wife, a former *educator* no less (!), to homeschool FOUR CHILDREN.

Yeah, he'll be the first to remind me that he's still not homeschooling - AND, he may very well not go down that road.

But, if he starts a home Kumon program with any application at all....he, or anyone else, will be hardpressed to send his kids into the infantilized factory school *system*.

Today's adults (including moi) are impervious to reason; they are mentally lazy AND stubborn. Therefore it's hard to convince anyone via intellectual argument of just about anything. Instead, hard evidence must be waved in their faces.

That may be my son's precocity to start with; then the clincher will be that of their own kids'.

John Taylor Gatto insists that "genius....is as common as dirt."

And Malcolm Gladwell's research essentially corroborates:

The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everybody else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Visit my prior post - Outliers - A Must Read.

That book lit a fire under my hiney; it could very well have the same effect on y'all - on your work, your golf game, or on your parenting.

Taking Aim At Ave Maria

Ave Maria is a new planned community just northeast of Naples, Florida. It's been designed and built by centi-millionaire Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza.

It's to be a Roman Catholic town centered around, well, the church, and a new Catholic university. I actually drove out to visit it while I was snowbirding in January - and was quite impressed. The facilities are tremendous as were the people we bumped into. I've got to tell you, it's not often I meet college kids that resemble what 19 year olds used to resemble over the past few millenia....i.e. YOUNG ADULTS. A few stopped to talk to my kids, offered to take pictures of us, and showed us around. I was there with my MIL and we both thought the exact same thing, "This is where her granddaughters ought to go college to meet their husbands!"

Anyway, don't you think a town of such explicit purpose would invite the usual Commi-pagan critics?

Of course it would!

The local Naples paper or news *site*, whatever it is has recently been running this:



First off, anytime a paper runs a multi-part special report, you can be sure journalism has been subordinated to a political agenda. For example, the most recent *multi-part* special I came across was the Boston Globe's six-part hagiography of bunghole Ted Kennedy.

The Ave Maria smear goes like this....apparently, when the town was founded, the developer WHO RISKED MILLIONS OF HIS OWN HARD EARNED MONEY used the normal legal avenues to maintain political control over what he was building. In other words, he set the municipality up so that he and his builder would essentially have voting precedence over any or all of the other elected officials. The Naples paper is trying to make this into a story when none exists at all. They are running around frantically trying to make residents apoplectic that *their votes don't count*....that this is an un-Constitutional disenfranchisement of residents....and that homebuyers down there weren't sufficiently disclosed to. Yet the paper can't really find anyone living there who's upset. All they can muster is some critical law professor who lives hundreds of miles away.

If you look more closely at that last pic (click on it), there's a video clip in the lower righthand corner subtitled,

"REACTION to 'A TOWN WITHOUT A VOTE' - Ave Maria residents sound off about developer's control".

Yet when you watch the video, click here, the only thing they sounded off on was the newspaper's insinuations and distortion!

You can read the articles:

Ave Maria - A Town Without a Vote: Developer keeping score on its ability to rule town

Ave Maria - A Town Without a Vote: Taxation without representation?

Ave Maria - A Town Without a Vote: Residents' control hinges on trust

Or you can get a primer from watching this video of the reporter discussing this manufactured story that he *spent 1.5 years on*!

The fact is, a developer has to maintain control when building an extensive project. If he doesn't, it mightn't fulfill his orginal design ambitions. For example, if the Domino's tycoon allowed others to interfere with his plans, say the co-ideologues of Naples News, he could end up with all his municipal workers UNIONIZED and DEMANDING PENSIONS....which would eventually bankrupt his town, just as they have every other one in America. Would you risk/spend your life's savings to build something only to leave it vulnerable to pagan statists?

I sure as heck wouldn't.

I don't *know* that Tom Monaghan was specifically scared of unions when his development team established what every other large developer did in terms of legal and economic self-protection....but I'm certain he should have been.

You see, as a nation we are trapped in ubiquitous statism. No town in Massachusetts, my home state, or probably any other state could ever just say, "You know what, we are going to do away with unions and pensions for municipal workers" or "We are going to close down all of our public schools...." There are laws codified against that. AND, loopholes would be closed via extortion. The state would revoke highway funds and whatnot for any little district that didn't *play ball*. Read John Taylor Gatto's - The Logical Tragedy Of Benson, Vermont to see a case study of institutionalized thuggery.

Seriously, make certain you read that astonishing story.

Okay. So our entire country is mired in overlapping local, state, and federal socialism. The only cure, the only real hope against a thuggish monopoly is innovation. People need to be able to move on and build completely different communities. That is arguably what Ave Maria is all about. It's opting out of what hasn't worked - at least from the standpoint of its residents.

This is why Ave Maria is and will always be in the sights of the Moronic, pagan statists.

Now my good friend who lives down in Naples, he visited Ave Maria shortly after I did. He said that there he saw a large mixed-age group of kids playing soccer; and then, when they were done, they sat down to eat a conspicuously civilized lunch. Short on articulation, my witness said it was truly a sight to behold.

Mind you, my buddy was raised Catholic (I think) and has since gone evangelical Christian with a tinge of anti-Catholicism (like all of dem' Protestants!). So I deem his favorable impression to be noteworthy.

[In fairness, what he saw was probably independent of Ave Maria. I think he just bumped into the homeschooling group. I took my kids out with a local homeschooling group yesterday and the entire time my 4.5 year old son was *socializing* with 11 and 12 year olds who didn't mind his company one bit. Meanwhile, the government-schooled 6 year olds we usually see more often than not rebuff his overtures!]

Most people buy a vacation home for *pleasure* - a condo at the beach, a ski lodge, or a timeshare. After all, they need a respite from their thoroughly unsatisfying wage slavery.

But after visiting Ave Maria, I thought, why not buy a place there? Why not buy a second home in a place that could behoove my family morally? I am raising kids whose entire development is in my hands; AND it's a task I take most seriously. I submit it's extremely healthy, for all of us, to be around as many grounded people as we can in lieu of our idiot neighbors.

PLUS, Ave Maria has a decent golf course, it's still sunny Florida, and less than an hour from the beach!



If my son ends up marrying some Masshole chick with *like* 1,000 friends on Facebook, zero independently-arrived-at opinions, and one of those ridiculous pink Red Sox hats instead of say, someone like these marketable broads above....

I'll have failed as a parent - no matter how fluent my son is at trignometry or how versed I've made him in world history.

I'm almost 35 now; we're a bit past the six-weddings-to-attend-each-year stage.

All we hear about now are tragic divorces.

More On Phrenology

Phrenology is a discredited science of yesteryear.

It asserted that "....the personality traits of a person were determined by 'reading' bumps and fissures in the skull."

These quacks literallly mapped the brain and hailed it as science!

The 27 "brain organs" were:

1) The instinct of reproduction (located in the cerebellum).
2) The love of one's offspring.
3) Affection and friendship.
4) The instinct of self-defense and courage; the tendency to get into fights.
5) The carnivorous instinct; the tendency to murder.
6) Guile; acuteness; cleverness.
7) The feeling of property; the instinct of stocking up on food (in animals); covetousness; the tendency to steal.
8) Pride; arrogance; haughtiness; love of authority; loftiness.
9) Vanity; ambition; love of glory (a quality "beneficent for the individual and for society").
10) Circumspection; forethought.
11) The memory of things; the memory of facts; educability; perfectibility.
12) The sense of places; of space proportions.
13) The memory of people; the sense of people.
14) The memory of words.
15) The sense of language; of speech.
16) The sense of colours.
17) The sense of sounds; the gift of music.
18) The sense of connectedness between numbers.
19) The sense of mechanics, of construction; the talent for architecture.
20) Comparative sagacity.
21) The sense of metaphysics.
22) The sense of satire; the sense of witticism.
23) The poetical talent.
24) Kindness; benevolence; gentleness; compassion; sensitivity; moral sense.
25) The faculty to imitate; the mimic.
26) The organ of religion.
27) The firmness of purpose; constancy; perseverance; obstinacy.

I first learned about this rather funny junk science from John Taylor Gatto. Apparently all the architects of government schooling were zealous phrenologists - in particular Horace Mann, the patron saint of state-sponsored *education*. Read this passage below from Gatto's book:

Magic At Work

Magic in one form or another had always appealed to professional school authorities as the means to manage students. Horace Mann, as you know, dedicated his entire Sixth Report to a paean in praise of phrenology, the "science" of reading head bumps, and every major schoolman from Mann to G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey was a serious phrenologist—long after the craze had vanished from upper-class drawing rooms and salons. That should tell you something important about the inner itches of these men, I think. The quest for certainty in a confusing new land without rules was as much the religion of our founding schoolmen as searching one’s family for signs of reprobation had been for Puritans. But modern schoolmen needed a scientific cast over their religiosity, times having changed.

Early educational psychologists scientized the practice of manipulation behind a common expression of modern pedagogy—"motivation." Book after book advised pedagogues how to "motivate" charges with technical advice based on an underlying premise that young people did not want to learn and had to be tricked into it, a premise which on the face of common experience was absurd. As the significance of Bernays’ arguments penetrated the high command of government and industry, so too did manipulation become sine qua non in classroom teaching, the standard by which teacher quality was measured.

But the methods of Bernays or of educational psychologists like Dewey, Munsterberg, Judd, Hall, Cattell, Terman, Thorndike, Goddard, and Watson which so radically transformed the shape of twentieth-century schooling are about indoctrination strategies—building and using psychological tools to create compliant children. If nature hadn’t cooperated by actually making empty children, then schooling would have to do the job. And yet, for what grand purpose children had to be emptied, not many knew. For those without religious training or ignorant of the evolutionary sciences, it made only the bleakest sort of sense.

Obviously, that excerpt transcends the subject of phrenology. But I wanted to post it in full because it's darn insightful, and frightful. Read it again, and again until digested. Here's the link.

Note how Mann brought America educational reforms straight from Nazi Germany Prussia.

Here's more on Horace Mann from Wikipedia:

In this journal, Mann targeted the public school and its problems. The six main problems he targeted were: (1) the public should no longer remain ignorant and free, (2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public; (3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children of all diversities; (4) that this education must be non-sectarian; (5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society; and (6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers. To sum it all up, Horace Mann worked effectively for more and better equipped school houses, longer school years (until 16 years old), higher pay for teachers, and a wider curriculum.

In 1852, he supported governor Edward Everett in the decision to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Shortly after Everett and Mann collaborated to adopt the Prussian system, the Governor of New York set up the same method in twelve different New York schools on a trial basis.

The practical result of Mann's work was a revolution in the approach used in the common school system of Massachusetts, which in turn influenced the direction of other states. In carrying out his work, Mann met with bitter opposition by some Boston schoolmasters who strongly disapproved of his innovative pedagogical ideas [4], and by various religious sectarians, who contended against the exclusion of all sectarian instruction from the schools. He is often considered "the father of American public education".

And now here's a quote from this dirtbag that you won't find on Wikipedia, or any Big Education hagiographies:

I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.
- - -Horace MANN

I'll bet when I die, I won't have uttered anything 1/10th as Moronic as the above statement in my entire lifetime - including drunken stupors, addled youth, and drooling 'old coot-hood'.

To read my recent, and lighter, post on phrenology....click here.

Homeschool Evangelism - Shaming Others For The Welfare Of Their Children

This weekend my wife was at the store with our 4.25 year old.

He espied a girl from his *pre-school*:

Prince C-Nut - Hi Sally,.....HOW WAS FLORIDA? Did you go to Orlando or Naples?

Now this girl's dad was blown away by my son's conversational/geographical aptitude. Of course he had to *answer* for his daughter. Most of my son's age-mates can barely say hello or state their name - they definitely can't discern or expound on the difference between Disney World and 'old coot'-ville Naples.

And the other day at the library some kid had a shirt on that read "Cooler Than Ice". I grabbed the Prince and made him read it - which he did competently on the spot. The father of the other boy exclaimed, "HE'S READING?!?!?!"

Well, we practice reading every thing we see: cereal boxes, road signs, DVD cases, food labels, etc.

And here's the last example, just from the past week. Some other *mom* brought her kids over for a *playdate*. One of the girls was a bit older than the rest of the brats. Thus she was *bored*. So my wife grabbed her and said, "Hey let's read a book. Let's read Madeline..."

But the young lady, despite being 6 and despite attending a $22,000 per year kindergarten couldn't read. In fact she couldn't read ANY of the words. My Captious 4 year old was blurting out the story over her shoulder right in front of her, hopefully embarrassed, *mom*.

A lot of prospective homeschoolers fret that they won't be able to teach their kids ALL of the subjects; that they're kids might very well miss out on *something*.

Here's the rejoinder:

If you start them young; do a little work everyday like Kumon books; you'll end up like me. Your kids will be so far advanced, at such a young age, that such a fear will become laughably remote.

Well fears of inadequacy will become remote for you, but not for the other parents who come into contact with your children.

Then they'll be deflectively blaming *the school*!



Last year, after my son displayed some advanced erudition at a friend's house, the mother there got scared. She got scared that her husband would find out how *behind* their Montessori-educated child was in comparison. Serious, she said, "Oh boy, I hope [husband's name] doesn't find out....he'll be furious."

Good for that *dad* anyway. At least he has some expectations for the $34-per-hour education he's paying for.

Convincing someone to homeschool is not anything that can be easily accomplished with words and persuasion. That's why I encourage people to read John Taylor Gatto, to start the Kumon books, etc. - this way, the parents will soon realize how infantilized the school systems are by comparison. They will see as plain as day how low institutional expectations are compared to their children's capabilities.

One other point I want to make about my son's precocity is that except for 5 hours per week, he's with me, a competent, complete-sentence-wielding adult all day. The other kids who are *daycared* are stuck with a bunch of juvenile, mute mush-heads all week long.

I'm telling you. All these preschoolers who've been age-segregated, they can't even speak - which is a curious deficiency for those presumed to be developing *social skills*.

The Wire

I started watching and really enjoying HBO's The Wire in the middle of Season Two, some 5 or 6 years ago. So I missed the first season - and even the last one because we no longer had HBO, which we've got back now.

Recently I've been watching Season One through HBO On-Demand and my zeal for the show has been reawakened.

You see, despite its riveting drama, The Wire is a foray into deeper socio-political and even philosophical matters. I'll let the creator describe in his own words:

Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how ... whether you're a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to."^[1]

I kind of sensed these undercurrents 5 years ago, but not fully - my mind was in a completely different place back then. No kids. I might not have even been married yet. It was PCN time - before the incarnation of CaptiousNut!

Allow me to elaborate on the show.

In Season One, a cop (McNulty) brings a drug lord to the attention of a judge, who then makes waves with the higher-ups. The police chief knows nothing of these thugs who are running half of Baltimore's narcotics and who are terrorizing whomever gets in their way. So rogue politicians made some noise and demanded the cops tackle these dangerous criminals. Instead of taking up the task with dutiful pride, the police commissioner goes apesh*t. First, he is pissed because this development, i.e. his ignorance and incompetence, made him look bad politically. He doesn't care one iota about the blood shed, children corrupted, or the justice unrendered. In fact, he makes it his prime focus to railroad the cop who *opened his goddamned mouth* and to sabotage the new investigative operation. Time after time in Season One, you see cops get into trouble for the most ironical crime possible, *doing police work*.

At root, The Wire is an exposé of the myriad failings of massive politicized institutions. Season One deals with cops and law enforcement. Later on they hit on politicians, unionized dock workers, public education, and more. Simon weaves all the themes and plots together, masterfully.

Read John Gatto's fulminations on Big Education, then go back and revisit The Wire. I promise the nuanced profundity you missed before will jump out and bite you!

Here's the opening scene from the pilot:



And here's a link to a video recapping Season One. If you haven't seen any of the episodes, don't watch too much of the recap; there's too much *plot spoilage*.

Muzzling John Gatto

About 2.5 years ago I stumbled upon John Taylor Gatto. What a discovery that was!

In his current book, he explains why his last book got little traction:

Right from the early days of my teaching life, I began a project of research which involved reading and arguing with thousands of books, many dreadfully written and some quite obscure, travelling (by now) three million miles around the country and the world to observe, argue, and discuss schools and which resulted in a monster book, still in print, called The Underground History of American Education. A major publisher paid me an enormous amount of money to write it (enormous for a schoolteacher) and then refused to publish it after holding it off the market for over a year. "It would embarrass friends of the house," I was told. If you wonder what that might mean, consider this was one of the top three textbook publishing houses too, apart from their trade division.

Note they refused to publish the book not because it was *disputed*....

They took a loss on the book advance and censored the facts of mass compulsory schooling from public dialogue merely because it might *embarrass* crony elites.

That's from page 103 of Weapons of Mass Instruction.

Greg Mankiw - Problems With His Staff Size

Greg Mankiw on our bankrupt banks and the specter of *nationalization*:

I don't pretend to be enough of an expert, or to be close enough to the facts, or to have a large enough staff, to know what should be done with the banking system, which is at the center of our current economic turmoil.

If the government is to intervene in a big way to fix the banking system, "nationalization" is the wrong word because it suggests the wrong endgame. If banks are as insolvent as some analysts claim, then the goal should be a massive reorganization of these financial institutions. Some might call it nationalization, but more accurately it would be a type of bankruptcy procedure.

Bankruptcy could become, in effect, a massive bank recapitalization. Essentially, the equity holders are told, "Go away, you have been zeroed out." The debt holders are told, "Congratulations, you are the new equity holders." Suddenly, these financial organizations have a lot more equity capital and not a shred of debt! And all done without a penny of taxpayer money!

Did you catch that?

According to this Harvard genius, this intellectual powerhouse, all it takes is a stroke of the pen, a canceling of equity to recapitalize the banks!

First of all, debt holders ALREADY own the banks. They have first crack at the assets in a liquidation - or at least precedence over stock holders.

Second of all, no debt holder WANTS to become a mere equity holder. They want their promised interest and an eventual return of their principal. Furthermore, you can't just wipe out the debt holders without serious negative wealth-effect ramifications; there'd be CDS (credit default swap) consequences to boot.

Thirdly, the idea that *debt* is what ails the banks is a ridiculous mis-diagnosis. Banks are ravaged by EXCESS LEVERAGE and POOPY COLLATERAL.

A *larger staff* would most certainly not mitigate the ignorance of this quack. He's incorrigible!

Note that it wasn't enough for Greg Mankiw to first attempt to regulate comments and shortly thereafter wipe his blog clean of all comments, all *negative feedback*. See Greg Mankiw - Total Loser.

It looks like he's now removed all *Links To This Post* from his blog. It's not just that he doesn't want Captious retorts alongside his tripe.

He's determined to insulate himself from all criticism. He's Marginalizing himself!



Here's John Gatto:

I once heard someone in my own family, who I once loved very much, say,"I don't take criticism well," as if it were a boast, and I knew at that instant there was no way at all for her to grow in mind or character with that self-destructive attitude.

That's from page 62 of his new book - Weapons Of Mass Instruction. Y'all can blame that book for my *light* posting this weekend.

Fear not, I should be done with the book very quickly. By the way, it's his best book yet, by far.

John Taylor Gatto's New Book

My main man, John Gatto, has a new book out. I just ordered it yesterday and eagerly await delivery. Here's his description:



Weapons of Mass Instruction

John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking.

Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable, remove the obligation of child care from adult workers so they are free to fuel the industrial economy and to train the next generation into subservient obedience to the state.

John Gatto shows us that Ivy League schools do not produce the most successful graduates, some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs are high school drop outs and Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie didn’t finish elementary school. An education matters desperately, but spending a fortune on college fees will not get you one.

Filled with examples of people who have escaped the trap of compulsory schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction shows us realization of personal potential is not possible within the system of compulsory schooling. That requires a different way of growing up and learning, one Gatto calls "open source learning." In chapters such as "A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter"; "Fat Stanley"; and "Walkabout:London", Gatto gives us a window into a different reality.

You can order the book directly from his people - or through Amazon.com and whatnot.

If you have, or are planning to have, kids you'd be an a$$hole and a child-abuser not to spend the $25 and at least let Gatto's insights penetrate your closed, small mind.

I've mentioned Gatto several times in my 1,100 posts now. Click here.

More Gatto

So I just did finally read John Taylor Gatto's book Dumbing Us Down - a book I first mentioned last June. Yes, there's a preview on Google but don't expect to find it in your local library or local bookstore. I had been looking for it awhile before finding a single copy of it at a Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn.

Librarians and *bookstore* nimrods simply do not care for John Taylor Gatto - the patron saint of today's homeschoolers.

They don't care much for Will Durant either.

Look at this classy, highly intellectual book display from a Borders Bookstore(Seattle?).



If you have or are planning to have kids Dumbing Us Down is a *must read* - and a must *re-read*.

From page 15,

Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they could perceive an alternative. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found - in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built - then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material "sufficiency" which our global "experts" are so insistent we be concerned about.

I emphasized the key line - if they could perceive an alternative.

I've said it before but it merits repeating. I NEVER EVEN HEARD OF HOMESCHOOLING UNTIL I WAS 32 YEARS OLD.

How many millions of others out there are similarly ignorant?

It's absolutely amazing AND tragic how many of my friends and family members give me the stiff-arm on this conversation. Children aren't naturally closed-minded; this was inculcated.

Gatto's books are the window to the alternative. Your children are at stake here.