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Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to church out assembly line slaves. It's not a surprise that when the system is designed

Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to church out assembly line slaves. It's not a surprise that when the system is designed to turn humans into robots... that's what you get. Anyone who comes out of school with useful skills does it despite school, not because of school. John Taylor Gatto figured this out years ago.

pnathan 15y ago
Can we get more citations for this besides Gatto? I.e., do we have citations to some of Dewey's works, or the early 1900s academic reformers advocating this?
- forensic 15y ago
  Compare and contrast tradition schools for the wealthy with what became public school. A proper education comes when you put pupils in a room with a very smart person and let them question him. He answers their questions and introduces them to new ideas. Pupils guide the learning, tutors are just a resource. There are no lesson plans. This is how the great thinkers have learned and taught since the dawn of man. This is how the wealthy and in-the-know still educate themselves. When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. They invented "public education" and modeled it after church education where students are preached to and rigidly controlled. Church is a place where poor people go to be controlled. Public school extended this control programming to the formative years of all the children of the non-elite. Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity. Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. All the great thinkers, today and in the past, learned by directing themselves and (ideally) questioning smart people. Never by being whipped into doing lesson plans, always by following their creativity and doing investigations and self-directed projects.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    That is a thought experiment, not a citation. Also, German schooling was famously rigid, and produced a sizable crop of scientists in the 1900-1960 era.
    - forensic 15y ago
      Your mistake is thinking that school produced those scientists. They produced themselves despite school, not because of it, and they thrived because Germany invested heavily higher education and research. Science in Germany was due to German philosophy, higher education, and lots of funds. Universities in 1900 are indistinguishable from what we have now. In 1900 they were still targeted at the wealthy and unusually talented. Now they are just extended sunday school. Obedience training for adults.
      - pnathan 15y ago
        Citations, please! You are saying these things with massive assumptions! edit for clarification: you are not using any sort of proof mechanism in your statements. No data, no citations.
        forensic 15y ago
        Wouldn't it be great if you had a personal research assistant who would spend hours looking stuff up for you?
        pnathan 15y ago
        Wouldn't it be great if you had a conversation with someone who backed up their assertions instead of expecting belief?
        forensic 15y ago
        I don't expect belief. I expect effort. I imagine you doing the rounds at dinner parties raising your finger shouting "Citation needed!" over and over again. Google: gatto, liberal education, conformity, obedience. My argument is a point of view, not a research study. Gatto cites Dewey, for the record.
  - Daniel_Newby 15y ago
    > When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. Rather a lot of the scientists and engineers on the Apollo program grew up in tiny backwater schools funded by local subscription. Their teachers were high school graduates or (if lucky) graduates of a two year normal college. The "educated upper class" consisted of the local town fathers who thought that the average teenager was capable of a lot more than the amusements they would have otherwise picked for themselves. It turns out the town fathers were right. > Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of learning the classics of high culture in what you are claiming are industrial indoctrination factories. > Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. Calculus, computer science, electromagnetism, chemistry, writing, poetry, etc. 16-year-old me was not yet organized and knowledgeable enough to know where to even begin.
epo 15y ago
Perhaps nobody wants to admit it because few are that stupidly paranoid. For one, schools predate assembly lines. For another, if that is what schools were designed to do then they are remarkably poor at it. The ruling cabal who you seem to think is trying to push us all into servitude would surely have noticed and remedied the situation YEARS ago. Finally, you did read enough of the article to realise it was about the UK? What this Gatto person thinks is irrelevant.
- forensic 15y ago
  Churches predate assembly lines too. It's not about literal assembly lines, it's about obedience and conformity, the tools of social control since time immemorial. Public school is just the latest version of obedience training.
- randomdata 15y ago
  He does have a point. A high school teacher friend of mine and I were discussing how certain aspects of school, like scheduled class time, project deadlines, etc. were intended to prepare the students for the workplace. As an adult who makes my own choices, I only work when I want to work, and I only meet deadlines which I set on my own accord. I imagine, given the context of this site, that a lot in the HN crowd are the same way. However, when you get out into the real world, most people do follow the same schedule and obey the same rules that were ingrained into them in school. A lot of people do not even realize that they have choice. I have actually met people who look down upon me for not following the same 9-5 schedule that everyone else does, like it matters or something. I imagine that attitude comes from their upbringing by having it pushed upon them by educators. I wouldn't go as far to say that the only reason for school is to shape people into obedient workers, but that element is definitely present.
  - forensic 15y ago
    If you cancelled all schools right now, no one would stop learning useful and applicable skills. But many many people would stop being obedient. The bait of school is the opportunity to learn, something every human inherantly loves. The opportunity to learn and access to knowledge is just the sugar that is used to get you to swallow the medicine: the medicine is your obedience training. When people graduate from high school, often the only thing they have to show for it is their obedience and conformity. If they are good readers, they probably read a lot outside the curriculum. If they are good at math, they probably did a lot of math outside the curriculum. etc. One thing from the curriculum which they did thoroughly learn, however, is how to obey, how to conform, how to navigate bureaucracy, how to play social pecking order games, when to bully, when to submit. Conspicuously absent from the gifts of the curriculum is anything related to what used to be called a liberal education or an enlightened scientific education. These things are always learned despite curriculums, and those who achieve a true scientific or artistic education usually have the air of a rebel or hacker, someone who eschews their lessons, who breaks out of the mold, who skips their homework in favour of reading poetry or hacking their graphics calculator. At school, true learning is always a form of rebellion.

pnathan 15y ago

Can we get more citations for this besides Gatto? I.e., do we have citations to some of Dewey's works, or the early 1900s academic reformers advocating this?

forensic 15y ago
Compare and contrast tradition schools for the wealthy with what became public school. A proper education comes when you put pupils in a room with a very smart person and let them question him. He answers their questions and introduces them to new ideas. Pupils guide the learning, tutors are just a resource. There are no lesson plans. This is how the great thinkers have learned and taught since the dawn of man. This is how the wealthy and in-the-know still educate themselves. When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. They invented "public education" and modeled it after church education where students are preached to and rigidly controlled. Church is a place where poor people go to be controlled. Public school extended this control programming to the formative years of all the children of the non-elite. Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity. Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. All the great thinkers, today and in the past, learned by directing themselves and (ideally) questioning smart people. Never by being whipped into doing lesson plans, always by following their creativity and doing investigations and self-directed projects.
- pnathan 15y ago
  That is a thought experiment, not a citation. Also, German schooling was famously rigid, and produced a sizable crop of scientists in the 1900-1960 era.
  - forensic 15y ago
    Your mistake is thinking that school produced those scientists. They produced themselves despite school, not because of it, and they thrived because Germany invested heavily higher education and research. Science in Germany was due to German philosophy, higher education, and lots of funds. Universities in 1900 are indistinguishable from what we have now. In 1900 they were still targeted at the wealthy and unusually talented. Now they are just extended sunday school. Obedience training for adults.
    - pnathan 15y ago
      Citations, please! You are saying these things with massive assumptions! edit for clarification: you are not using any sort of proof mechanism in your statements. No data, no citations.
      - forensic 15y ago
        Wouldn't it be great if you had a personal research assistant who would spend hours looking stuff up for you?
        pnathan 15y ago
        Wouldn't it be great if you had a conversation with someone who backed up their assertions instead of expecting belief?
        forensic 15y ago
        I don't expect belief. I expect effort. I imagine you doing the rounds at dinner parties raising your finger shouting "Citation needed!" over and over again. Google: gatto, liberal education, conformity, obedience. My argument is a point of view, not a research study. Gatto cites Dewey, for the record.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  > When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. Rather a lot of the scientists and engineers on the Apollo program grew up in tiny backwater schools funded by local subscription. Their teachers were high school graduates or (if lucky) graduates of a two year normal college. The "educated upper class" consisted of the local town fathers who thought that the average teenager was capable of a lot more than the amusements they would have otherwise picked for themselves. It turns out the town fathers were right. > Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of learning the classics of high culture in what you are claiming are industrial indoctrination factories. > Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. Calculus, computer science, electromagnetism, chemistry, writing, poetry, etc. 16-year-old me was not yet organized and knowledgeable enough to know where to even begin.

epo 15y ago

Perhaps nobody wants to admit it because few are that stupidly paranoid. For one, schools predate assembly lines. For another, if that is what schools were designed to do then they are remarkably poor at it. The ruling cabal who you seem to think is trying to push us all into servitude would surely have noticed and remedied the situation YEARS ago. Finally, you did read enough of the article to realise it was about the UK? What this Gatto person thinks is irrelevant.

forensic 15y ago
Churches predate assembly lines too. It's not about literal assembly lines, it's about obedience and conformity, the tools of social control since time immemorial. Public school is just the latest version of obedience training.
randomdata 15y ago
He does have a point. A high school teacher friend of mine and I were discussing how certain aspects of school, like scheduled class time, project deadlines, etc. were intended to prepare the students for the workplace. As an adult who makes my own choices, I only work when I want to work, and I only meet deadlines which I set on my own accord. I imagine, given the context of this site, that a lot in the HN crowd are the same way. However, when you get out into the real world, most people do follow the same schedule and obey the same rules that were ingrained into them in school. A lot of people do not even realize that they have choice. I have actually met people who look down upon me for not following the same 9-5 schedule that everyone else does, like it matters or something. I imagine that attitude comes from their upbringing by having it pushed upon them by educators. I wouldn't go as far to say that the only reason for school is to shape people into obedient workers, but that element is definitely present.
- forensic 15y ago
  If you cancelled all schools right now, no one would stop learning useful and applicable skills. But many many people would stop being obedient. The bait of school is the opportunity to learn, something every human inherantly loves. The opportunity to learn and access to knowledge is just the sugar that is used to get you to swallow the medicine: the medicine is your obedience training. When people graduate from high school, often the only thing they have to show for it is their obedience and conformity. If they are good readers, they probably read a lot outside the curriculum. If they are good at math, they probably did a lot of math outside the curriculum. etc. One thing from the curriculum which they did thoroughly learn, however, is how to obey, how to conform, how to navigate bureaucracy, how to play social pecking order games, when to bully, when to submit. Conspicuously absent from the gifts of the curriculum is anything related to what used to be called a liberal education or an enlightened scientific education. These things are always learned despite curriculums, and those who achieve a true scientific or artistic education usually have the air of a rebel or hacker, someone who eschews their lessons, who breaks out of the mold, who skips their homework in favour of reading poetry or hacking their graphics calculator. At school, true learning is always a form of rebellion.