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Mainstream Studies of Dumbed-Down Compulsory Universal Schooling

This would merely be a paranoid, conspiratorialist rave–except that the evidence is all in the notes. (This posting isn’t intended so much as an article, as a set of easily accessible notes for making arguments.)

You can sometimes learn more from your presumptive ‘opponents’ than from your alleged friends, who can actually be acting in Pecksniffian self-interest presenting a highly-filtered public persona, on the presumption that they know better than you what you need to know. Regardless of the functional debilities of extreme leftism, Noam Chomsky still aspires to the tenet of classical liberalism, that “I strongly uphold your right to your point of view, no matter how strongly I disagree with you”. It’s sometimes worth listening to what he has to say.

Noam Chomsky, citing Ralph Waldo Emerson on the elites’ rationale for agitating for universal, compulsory education: “The grounds on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education, is fear” … [that, in their words, he says] … “This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats”, meaning, “educate them the right way,” keep their perspectives and their understanding narrow and restricted, discourage free and independent thought, and frighten them into obedience –something that’s done over and over in the schools as well–we’ve all experienced it.”

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Before factory schooling, young people, whether geniuses or working people, were free to write their own life script.

WE breed water dogs not to bite game birds, we hood falcons to control them, when race horses run too fast we “handicap” them with lead weights, and when students are in danger of independent learning so that they threaten to evade being conditioned into mindless consumers and docile, unquestioning employees of giant corporations, we subject them to “schooling”.
College graduates today have been denied, by design, a basic liberal-arts education that was freely available to many 1-room schoolhouse, elementary students prior to the imposition of universal forced schooling in the period 1880-1920. It was a result of planned, deliberate deprecation of curricula and intense, adverse behavioral conditioning, which long preceded their high school graduation. A vast store of evidence for this assertion, unknown to the general public, is in freely available authors in a tradition of “studies of Deliberate Dumbing Down K-12”. (Author list at the end of the article.)
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The issue of deliberate dumbing down (DDD), of unimaginably vast scope, centers on the confidential history, virtually never discussed openly in the press or taught in schools or colleges themselves, that contrasts the rigidly controlled, standard anti-intellectual conditioning children receive today in public schools, with the extreme opposite, self-directed, radical freedom which prevailed in America prior to the railroads (1840).
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America from the Colonial/Revolutionary period, until the mid-19th century, was an outpost of personal independence, granted immunity by geographical isolation, from the restrictive model of Europe’s old-world, highly stratified class system. (America was at a colonial “margin” at some distance from the imperial center, England. The historical dissolution in the mother country of the ancient, manorial-feudal medieval society in which peasants had traditional rights to the land which their lord could not abrogate, had been disrupted centuries earlier in England than in America, with the enclosure of common lands for specialized sheep-grazing for the Italian wool trade by the lower gentry, socially rapacious behavior in common with the higher nobility, friends of Henry VIII, in the despoiling of Church lands built up over centuries of free labor accumulation under the evangelical counsel of Poverty. This pattern of dissolution only encroached on the colonial margin in America, centuries after it happened at the center, in England.) For instance, it was illegal in 19th century England to teach to lower class children, what John Taylor Gatto termed “the active literacies”, writing, public speaking and the cultivation of eloquence.
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Concurrent with the liberal Protestant biblical studies (“Historical-Critical Method”) of Adolf von Harnack in the late 19th century which “proved” that biblical accounts of miracles were “fantasies”, agnostic or atheist northern German philosophers were instrumental in enlarging on the rationalist foundation of the French Enlightenment until the late 19th century rise of the Fabian Socialist Society (symbol: a wolf in sheep’s clothing) espoused by the high architects of compulsory, universal, dumbed-down schooling. In contrast with the 99% of humanity which has believed in some sort of God, “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe nothing, they’ll believe anything”.
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"There can’t be a God, nor any Heaven", (the outlook that "proves one is a 'scientist' "), therefore, let’s “create” heaven on earth, “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”, (never to be resurrected into any eternal paradise), continually “improving” humanity, reinventing ourselves, on Darwin’s racist model of human “survival of the fittest”, leading to Hitler’s death factories and ultimately, today, to Bill Gates’ great purge of the “excess” of the majority of humanity.
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A free people would never accept this. Therefore, starting in the mid-19th century, American children had to be wrested out of their family traditions and religions by secretly socialistic, anti-intellectual conditioning, subjecting them, in compulsory, universal, police-enforced, deliberately dumbed-down schooling, beyond the parents’ knowledge and understanding, to the endless drudgery of factory schooling, “at least keeping them off the streets and out of trouble”, precisely from the age when their brains should be furiously, delightfully absorbing everything about the wonderful, fascinating world.

Because solid learning from ancient times, the Trivium of Grammar (good literature and other basics of culture and learning), Logic (how, not what, to think) and Rhetoric (persuading others of the truth, and learning it yourself in greater depth in the process), protected students from exploitation by elite controllers of society, students had to be subjected to the fun-house world familiar in the school institution today.
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This required laying the foundation for schooling, not on the basis of the classics of Western Civilization, the first among equals of nine great world civilizations–the free legacy of each citizen of the world–but upon planned disruption of them and opposition to them–the chimera of cultural appropriation as asserted by people with no appreciable education, nor even, culture, themselves–by vilification of the great and the good books (Dead White Males), and by an insidious control curriculum to thwart the acquisition of a solid academic foundation, to deliberately “crush the imagination” and stymie development of habits of independent thought immune to elite control.
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“The language of Shakespeare and classical literature—at the least Virgil, Plutarch, Cicero, and Homer—so permeated the letters and journals of frontier Americans that modern readers have difficulty understanding that generation’s literary metaphors.” – The Myth That Americans Were Poorly Educated Before Mass Schooling
Americans of the Colonial-Revolutionary period had a literacy rate in the high 90th percentile, in the absence of European social controls, virtually all Yankees, even indentured servants and slaves, the common people, were able to learn on their own, to understand and debate the sophisticated politics of Thos. Payne’s “Common Sense” (600,000 copies sold to a population of 2.3 million Revolutionary Colonialists), the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers at a depth incomprehensible to today’s mis-educated college students, even to Poli-Sci graduate students.
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This accorded with the Protestant ethic that people must be able to read their Bibles. Americans typically attained solid, basic literacy in a mere 40 hours of phonics, and practical numeracy in only 42 hours of arithmetic study (my grandfather, William Penny Keevers, a grocer, could add a running 3 column total in his head without a mechanical calculator), after which 13 year olds were expected to be pursuing self-employment and could enlarge their own education with such limited resources as were available to them, largely the Bible, Shakespeare and Plutarch’s Lives–not a bad foundation.
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Ariel Durant started a life-long career by 15, collaborating with her husband Will Durant researching and writing best selling history. The Durants were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 for Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth volume of The Story of Civilization.
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Self-employment and self-reliance were the default life path expectations for young people of the early 19th century, and were closely allied with productive, basic education of the type systematically denied to young people today.
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Despite elaborate anxiety about “child labor”, there are numerous anecdotes about adult-acting 13 year olds like Thos. Edison (publisher of the Grand Trunk Railroad “Herald“), David Farragut (commanded captured British prize ship with unruly prisoners at 12) and John Quincy Adams (the only member who spoke Russian in the early Revolutionary-period, U.S. diplomatic mission to the court of Saint Petersburg, active in diplomatic negotiations, at 14).

Felix Mendelssohn

Allegro Molto of Felix Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 8 in D major, the piece written as one of a group between the ages of 12 and 14, compositions immensely more virtuosic than anything Mozart was doing at that age.
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Names of today’s communities with a continuing, strong ethos of self-employment, necessarily involving the freedom of young adolescents to spread their wings unimpeded by controls from the financial ultra-elite, are the North American Amish and the Spanish Catalan/Basque Mondragon Commune.

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G. Stanley Hall with Freud and Jung
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The rapid, forced industrialization of the American people from 1880-1920 required direct squelching of young people’s vigorous pursuit of their life path. Prussian-trained G. Stanley Hall applied the German-Romantic concept of sturm und drang, “storm and stress”, in his 1904 book Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education to the labor-oversupply side of industrial capitalism’s chronic overproduction. Hall’s work introducing the novel category adolescence, resulted in the diversion of millions of young people away from the pursuit of a productive, self-directed livelihood, relegating them to the dead end of perpetual adolescence in deliberately dumbed down schools, a principle now to be extended indefinitely into old-age with Life-Long Learning as documented by John Klyczek.

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Prior to the Civil War, when 97% of the population were engaged in the pursuit of agriculture, the ideal was self-employment on wholly-owned farms, true agrarianism—you produced everything your family consumed—without any participation in a money economy, only barter, from your own excess agricultural production, for items beyond self-production, perhaps a plow you couldn’t forge for yourself.

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A researcher studied the simple work diary of a Yankee farmer from 1775-1795. If one his journal entries for a certain date was “made a barrel”, he had to have pre-cured the raw wooden staves in a curved shape, perfectly planed the curved pieces in the shape of waterproof staves, planed with water-tight fitting. Meanwhile, he had to forge the two bands at either end, but their shape would have to be slightly flared with a curve. Then he fit the wooden ends, and made a bung-hole and a wooden tap. In an industrial economy, he would be considered a journeyman. But on the farm where “you did everything”, this task that would have given him the name “cooper” was only one of 200 “vocations” which he was qualified to practice. His sons would have trained with him, on the expectation that they would become self-employed on farms they wholly owned; they would not be confined to a soul-prison with rootless kids of their own age who couldn’t tell each other who they were, they would be sure of their identities. But instead, their great-great-great grandsons, having been dispossessed of their inheritance by the tax-man and Wall St., would have the “life vocation” of turning a single nut on Mr. Ford’s assembly line, every 8 seconds for 14-16 hours per day, six days per week, no vacations.

Mr. Gatto related how by 1880, after the railroad facilitated carnage of the Civil War, Americans were being forcably moved off their own farms — where they did everything — and into millionaire owned factories, where they were just cogs in a machine. (Financial exploitation of indebted soldiers returning from the Civil Was is one common explanation for the forced exodus.) The titans of Wall St., Morgan, Carnegie, Astor, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, regarded the Yankee tradition of auto-didactic, small farmers, mechanics/engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs, as a lethal competition threat to Financial Capitalists’ Wall St. accumulation of investment monies. The elites’ most efficient solution was to undermine this threat by strangling it in the cradle; the effort to control the intellectual uprising of the common people coalesced in the very foundation of universal, compulsory/police-enforced public schooling. The compulsory, universal public school system as we understand it, was never without built-in institutional handicapping of the vast majority of students.
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This calculated, intellectual poisoning was formally predicated on the writings of a Prussian philosopher, Johann Fichte who had written “Addresses to the German Nation” (1808-1818) to the Prussian King, demanding universal, compulsory, deliberately dumbed-down schooling, laying fault for the Prussian defeat by the French in the 1806 Battle of Jena at the feet of Napoleon’s motto “every corporal with a field marshal’s baton in his rucksack”–in other words, non-commissioned, non-professional infantry were formally directed to countermand orders from the elite, stratified professional officer class when local battlefield situations dynamically change. “The French let their commoners loose with too much independence, that’s why we lost to them” is the essence of what Fichte told King Wilhelm. Failed Indiana New Harmony commune leader Robert Owen proposed deliberate dumbing down to the Prussian king around 1830.
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Mr. Gatto charmingly terms the gist, “we have to crush children’s imagination”, to stop lower class people from running amok threatening destabilizing, inventive innovation, disrupting the carefully regulated, top-planned economy, by regimenting all children into universal, compulsory, Deliberately Dumbed-Down (DDD) schooling.

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The curriculum of the early K-12 grades in the Prussian system would be recognizable today from the current iteration of deliberate dumbing-down, Social-Emotional Learning: pastels, crayons and balloons. But at the age of 13, students were set to fighting one another, also recognizable in the adverse social conditions formally fostered in the schools (Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!). One in 200 students would be the high leader, recognizable as the Alpha in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World outline of Alphas-Epsilons. The top 6 students tasked with implementing the Alpha’s directions would correspond with the Beta, administrator class. The middle Gamma-Delta classes, the vast majority, would be taught to fear and envy the top classes, and despise the “dumb kids”, implicitly, the Epsilons.

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The rise and proliferation of the Prussian-model, dumbed-down schooling system produced generations of Germans who wouldn’t cause trouble when confined to the factory floor or conscripted into the military. The revamped Prussian social-economy eventually succeeded in beating the French, in 1870. Germany’s greater success  than Britain in implementing this labor model lead to World War I, when Churchill and Lord Gray decided that the economy of previously pro-British Germany, was too great a threat to Britain’s.

Germany was the incubator of behavioral psychology for control of the masses, that taught that human beings were merely stimulus-responsive animals, a system that was spread in the late 19th century by German-trained, major university, psychology department chairmen to all major world countries, even China and Japan. (Paolo Lioni, “The Leipzig Connection”, free PDF.)

Horace Mann had 3 years to try deliberate dumbing down on the children of Boston in the 1840s, with whole-word/look-say vs phonics, but a general uproar ensued when literacy rates went down and it was temporarily halted. Dumbed-down early primary literacy conditioning went to Washington D.C. and NY; from 1880-1920 it became the law under sponsorship of the Titans of Wall St., with police enforcement. In 1917 there were riots in New York City against the 1907 Gary Indiana-model school curriculum.

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What follows is a prime example of backfiring of the Machiavellian manipulations on the part of a witless elite which only have the advantage of tyrannical control, but are otherwise, completely unqualified to rule, the opposite of Plato’s Philosopher Kings–it is called “blowback” in secret intelligence/Psy-Ops, in philosophy it is called “the cunning of reason”, Die List der Vernunft of Hegel.
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THE THIRD ROCKEFELLER GENERATION WERE INTELLECTUAL CRIPPLES: The Worm Eateth Its Own Tail (Ouroboros), The Rich Eat Their Own: Fabian Society founding member John Dewey (icon: yellow flag, black wolf dressed in white sheepskin climbing a flagpole, maroon flag with black letters “F.S.” for Fabian Society) was funded for his experimental Lincoln School by John D. Rockefeller II. The Lincoln School was attended by Rockefeller’s 4 younger sons Nelson, Laurance, David and Winthrop, some of the most powerful men in history who regulated the fates of millions of people.
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With only the exception of the eldest son J.D. Rockefeller III, all four of the other Rockefeller third generation sons emerged from John Dewey’s “whole-word/look-say” Lincoln School as intellectual cripples unable to read a newspaper: they all had dyslexia. Dyslexia expert Dr. Samuel Orton informed university psychology department educationists in 1931 that whole-word/look-see causes deleterious brain changes in Kindergarten-Grade 3.
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Marty’s pizza is bigger than Luis’ pizza.” If the answer doesn’t fit what’s in the Common Core Math answer key, it’s WRONG, and your kid is relegated to permanent stupidity.

Prof. Anthony Esolen has contrasting sets of textbooks covering the crucial divide in purging curricula, the period 1920-1930. The Christian acceptance of the classics of Western Civilization had been the norm, going back into the 1 room school institution where, in contrast with the “professionalization” of the not highly regarded schoolmaster profession, amateur, elder students tutored younger ones and it was far from unknown for students below 6th grade to be pursuing, what would be known in today’s dark ages as “academically advanced studies”, all in the little 1 room schoolhouse, nutritious, basic curriculum roughage that most college students today wouldn’t be able to manage. (School boards once local to communities, have been consolidated down from 75,000 to 15,000, the easier to ensure control by federal educrats.)
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Calculated intellectual starvation at the very time children should be learning the most–contrast with John Senior’s 1,000 Good Books

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By 1930, the classic-oriented curriculum with a phonics foundation, had been purged in exchange for Fun With Dick and Jane, whole-word/look-see, early primary literacy, handicapping indoctrination. By the time of Rudolph Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” 1955, no teachers had themselves been trained in classic literature, a prime goal of the atheist/agnostic/messianic secular-humanist founders of universal compulsory schooling from 1880-1920, the easier to ensure elite, top-down control of unruly lower masses in the interests of their tax-exempt non-profit foundation masters, the wealthy pathetic except for their inheritances who endowed the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

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The Science of Illiteracy (Click-Expand or Bypass)

Click ^ again to contract

September 23, 2022 – K–12: The Science of Illiteracy – By Bruce Deitrick Price

American Thinker

Emily Hanford became famous over the last several years for talking constantly about the Science of Reading. That’s where children learn to read in the simplest, most efficient way and go on to enjoy many hundreds of books. Long story short, what she means by the Science of Reading is phonics — nothing less, nothing else.

The problem is that the left in our country forced phonics into oblivion starting in 1931. So what was going on for those 90 years from 1931 to now? A titanic and quite stupid con, that’s what.

Basically, the professors of education at Harvard and such places identified and codified the things that work — and then (this is my summary) they made sure that none of those things are allowed in the schools. Only methods known not to work are praised in our classrooms. The simplest, most appropriate name for this approach is the Science of Illiteracy.

Sometimes the impression is given that these professors drifted around from one method to another. That’s actually not true. They have only one method — but it has many names (such as sight-words and Whole Word) — and they are content to hide inside the confusion they create.

Reading consists of learning two things: letters and sounds. If you’re not focusing on letters and sounds, you don’t have phonetic instruction of a phonetic language.

Note how precise the pseudo-reading program is. You get rid of letters and sounds. You don’t mention an alphabet, and you don’t teach children what the alphabet represents. The Science of Illiteracy is really easy. You just leave out the valuable parts and let kids struggle.

One of the oddest spectacles you’ll ever see is the top brains in American education all agreeing that the alphabet serves no useful purpose. How do you find fanatics like this?

These professors were monolithic; each one parroted the wisdom of the others. Each one finds a slightly different way of making the same dubious claims. Notice the smug, Olympian tone.

“Current practice in the teaching of reading does not require a knowledge of the letters,” says Dr. Donald D. Darrell.

“The skillful teacher will be reluctant to use any phonetic method with all children,” says Dr. Paul Witty.

Dr. Roma Gans tells it simply and starkly: “In recent years phonetic analysis of words at any level of the reading program fell into disrepute.”

“Little is gained by teaching the child sounds and letters as a first step to reading. More rapid results are generally obtained by the direct method of simply showing the word to the child and telling him what it is.” Thus spake Anderson and Dearborn.

“The words should be recognized as whole words. It is detrimental indeed to have the children spell or sound out the words at this stage.” That’s Bond and Wagner.

We have to thank Rudolf Flesch for creating a time capsule circa 1940 in the first chapter of his famous book Why Johnny Can’t Read. He quotes all the schemers shaping our culture. A dozen of these people took children down the wrong path so they would become victims of the Science of Illiteracy.

The success of Flesch’s book in 1955 was the first sign of resistance by ordinary citizens. The Education Establishment didn’t wait six months before it set up the counter-group known as the International Reading Association. This was a massive organization intended to keep teachers and parents in line. It succeeded to a tragic degree.

How do the professors refer to their voodoo reading? In the most respectful terms, as if Einstein had written it out for them. On the other hand, Rudolf Flesch complained that teaching children to read English with sight-words means eliminating 4,000 years of progress, as we moved from difficult symbol languages (such as Egyptian hieroglyphics) to more efficient ways to let great masses of people read their language.

Nineteen thirty-one was the beginning of the end of our school system. Yes, 1931. That’s when the education professors pushed phonics out of the public schools and imposed a sham method that virtually guaranteed that most students would become functional illiterates, evidently the goal of the Science of Illiteracy.

This power-grab in 1931 was historically remarkable. The Depression had just started. The country was nervous and unstable. The professors thought they had enough leverage to pull off a coup, almost as ambitious as the attack on Pearl Harbor but with even greater ramifications for the future.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all these professors quoted by Flesch were members of the Communist Party (AKA the Communist International). They were clearly in control of K–12 education in America. All they had to do was befuddle and outwit the public.

Money was a big factor. All the top professors made millions by creating a series of little books often referred to as Dick and Jane basal readers.

Please remember that Dr. Samuel Orton did a famous study in 1928 that determined that sight-words would mess up a child’s brain. Education professors had to pretend for decades that they believed in a method that they knew was fake. Their deception ushered in the Science of Illiteracy.

Throughout this saga, the Education Establishment bullied recklessly as they announced their visions, denounced all research that didn’t support their chicanery, and forced the children and parents to accept their Science of Illiteracy.

We see this reckless swagger now in the way the Democrats try to control government the same way they control education. Americans can learn so much about weaknesses in our democracy by studying K–12. Our ideals break down quickly when ruthless people break all the rules.

We can easily save the public schools, but only if we adhere to the Science of Reading. Here’s a four-minute version of that.

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Ideology From the Ivory Tower Down to the Normal Schools. Intellectuals spin ethereal theories about how the little people must live, but don’t pick up the tab. Educational Psychologists destroyed primary 1-6 education between 1920 and 1940, from Columbia Teacher’s College for “trainers of trainers”, to mis-educate generations of teachers at Normal Schools across America
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A Secondary School Teacher turned Historian Remarks upon the Dumbing Down Principle Moving Upwards into a Professional Context – The Realm of Academic Historians. (Post-Graduates seeking a place on the academic career path had better stick to establishment approved narratives; any movement outside orthodox viewpoints will doom a troublemaker’s career.) This principle is of the same tenor, to the same effect, of school children undergoing adverse cognitive and behavioral conditioning to prevent their achieving autonomy and finding truth, against the interests of elites in the hierarchical contemporary world which demands adherence to mass processing and disallows individual initiative outside those mass process parameters.

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Psychology Prof. Edward Lee Thorndyke, at Columbia Teachers’ College, discouraged basic education which serves as a foundation for self-determination, as useless, to be preferred to mass socialization to train young people to be good employees and not to cause any trouble.

“Studies of the capacities and interests of young children indicate the advisability of placing little emphasis before the age of six upon either the acquisition of those intellectual resources known as the formal tools—reading, spelling, arithmetic, writing, etc.—or upon abstract intellectual analysis. Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school is too narrow and academic in character. Traditionally the elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines.”

Children are not taught their coherent knowledge-base–identifiable in the Trivium as “Grammar”–beyond the limited needs of the severely-constricted, lifetime employment target irrevocably established in their testing-record early in K-3. (Your child has a secret identity number available to all employers, so forget about evading the system.) The constant down-grade in education attainment, which kids could evade if they weren’t institutionalized, is not accidental or incidental, it is the dedicated purpose of schooling.
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The Carnegie Foundation for World Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation funded pensions for “professional”, Normal School trained teachers at the turn of the 19th century…but at a price–if teachers wanted to avoid DDD and instead use initiative and good curricula to help students self-actualize, they would be got rid of.
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That damned Cat in the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition, as if you’re reading Chinese pictographs instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway, they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can learn so many words in a week and that’s all. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. – Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Arizona Magazine, June 1981Dr. Seuss was recruited from advertising with a list of 223 words for children to visually memorize without phonic deciphering ability, explicitly on the model of Chinese ideograms which must be “read” as pictures; late in life Theodor Geisel, now a race criminal, expressed regret at the damage he had caused facilitating dyslexia through whole-word/look-see, early primary, anti-literacy conditioning. Students’ usual comment when they are confronted with a new word is “I can’t read that, I’ve never seen it before”.
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They have no chance of discovering marvelous decoding power of unfamiliar words, of the phonetic base literacy, from the ancient Chaldean/Phoenician phonemic-symbolic, sound-symbol alphabet which underlies Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, Cyrillic/Russian and most western alphabet systems, one of the greatest innovations in human intellectual history.
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Mr. Gatto noted that the military tested recruits in WW2 at mid-90 percentile literacy rates, low-80 in Korea, high-60 percentile in Viet Nam, now the military has difficulty getting volunteers who can read a basic newspaper article.
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WE breed water dogs not to bite game birds, we hood falcons to control them, when race horses run too fast we “handicap” them with lead weights, and when students are in danger of independent learning so that they threaten to evade being conditioned into mindless consumers and docile employees of giant corporations, we subject them to “schooling”.

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Mr. Gatto notes how the structure of schooling is designed to handicap children: timed bells, location controls, switching from 1 disconnected subject to another while not allowing project completion or drawing higher associations between subject areas, continual invasion of privacy and lack of personal time (extended by t.v. prior to the internet on cell-phones with the result that kids are cynical, cruel and disconnected from communities), teacher domineering of the students’ attention agenda, explicit deprivation of self-directed studies and adulthood-oriented learning activities, arbitrary judgment and punishment-reward system for making students dependent on teachers for WHAT to think, not HOW TO LEARN to think for one’s self on the Trivium model.
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Students are taught to fear and envy the upper elites and despise the lower “dumb kids”. Students are age-segregated into ghettos of kids of similar age from whom they can’t receive any assistance discovering their own identities, which they used to get from adopting their parents’ livelihoods and culture as little adults. Disposable networks of limited purpose and duration fostered by schooling malfeasance have pushed out our formerly deep-rooted community involvement; school disrupts the free relationships in which people of all ages used to be able to freely associate with each other in in-depth personal involvement, people of different age categories offering involvement based on their life experience, young people giving the elderly their vigor, elderly people their wisdom and attention. Television pushed this out, now cell-phone based internet, in the future, field-generated connectivity to captivate all the senses so contact with ordinary reality can be continually monitored, regulated and modified by central controllers.
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Childhood which Mr. Gatto declared from the pre-technolocratic past normally to be over by 7, or 11 at the latest, is being indefinitely extended beyond the 20s with “life long learning” conditioning. (I worked with a man who had been in college from just after high school until his mid-50s, who had taken 5 college degrees without attaining any noticeable life accomplishment, college was simply an unreal world in which there was no accountability or self-checking about the results of one’s activity, if there had been some harm to others caused by intellectual experiments upon real-life people, there was no accountability.)
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From the beginning of the Prussian system as devised by behaviorsts like Pavlov’s teacher Wilhelm Wundt, students were socially conditioned to themselves insist on conformity in outlook and ideation, to be their own enforcers of ideological homogeneity, to socially punish rebellious individuality. This conformity drive continues with subtle but quite real, hierarchical student social groupings, Mean Girls (Queen Bees and Wannabes) under the personality corrosion of social media experience designed by experts in fostering addiction.
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As noted by Paolo Lioni (Leipzig Connection), the Prussian behaviorist system which sees humanity as only an aggregate of conditioned animal reactions, was spread by late 19th century psychology dept. chairmen. Pre-adolescent schooling in the Prussian model largely comprised, in effect, extended kindergarten, until age 13, when the students were formally set to fighting one another. In the Prussian model, one in 200 students, the high-elite Alphas in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, were taught to regulate the lower orders through a control hierarchy reposing on a second layer, a sub-elite of 6 in 200 students destined to become Beta administrators. Students by 2nd grade have a confidential federal identifier number indelibly setting their lifelong employment fate, universally accessible through data sharing by corporations, but unknown to parents.
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John Klyczek (School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education), a community college adjunct professor, takes this system, now using portable Chromebooks to convey operant conditioning long established in student computer software, into the period 1960-2021, with much background from Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America).
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Chromebooks are used as the vehicle for the conditioning methodology of B.F. Skinner, only to give students the bare minimum of training destining them for narrow job categories with severely limited upward mobility potential which they are assigned from early K-12. The cookie-cutter system is designed to produce legions of mindless consumers and compliant employees in gigantic corporations.

Francie and Neely’s German Grandmother remarks on the potential of self-education to free young people from the rigidity of old-world class systems, in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

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Mr. Gatto challenged B.F. Skinner’s method of “operant conditioning” treating human beings as lab rats. “I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow as many of the kids I taught as possible the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage … to maneuver them into positions where they would have a chance to be their own teachers and to make themselves the major text of their own education.”
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Skinner’s infant daughter Deborah, who wasn’t allowed to be touched, was the first experimental subject decades before computers confined your child’s mind in a portable Skinner box.

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Fascinating self-education in the library corner of the One-Room Schoolhouse: “…the older students sometimes helping the younger with their lessons; the younger overhearing the lessons of their elders and learning them almost before they [the senior students] learned them…Two of the lessons stand out in my mind. Each took up a single sheet of paper. One of them was headed by a couple of verses of devotional poetry. Beneath the verses, the student had parsed every word in the verses, describing what part of speech it was, what grammatical form it bore (case, number, and gender for nouns and adjectives; person, number, tense, mood, and voice for verbs), what function it served in its clause, and what relation it bore to other words. The student’s performance was entirely correct. The other lesson was obviously an introductory one: the student wrote a noun in its singular and plural forms, in the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases. This second student was clearly one of the younger children, as you could tell from an occasional roughness in his printing. The word in question was doulos (δοῦλος): Greek for “servant.” The children were evidently studying koine Greek, so as to be able to read the New Testament in the original tongue.” – Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: The Rebuilding of American Culture. Recollections of the “Anne of Green Gables” One-Room Schoolhouse in Orwell Corner, Prince Edward Island by Nova Scotia, where there was no upper-limit on what children could learn.
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Get Ready to Don Your Tinfoil Dunce’s Cap If You Buy Any of This

Mr. Gatto notes how a vast economic system irrevocably committed to the current schooling tyranny has an unreleasable deathlock on our children’s future. The arbitrary, capricious schooling policies come down from a vertical pipeline with such ingrained anonymity that school administrators have not the slightest idea from where they originate. A gamut of school unions dedicated to every occupational classification down to aides, crowd out the ostensible, original function of “education”; unions were originally part of the centralized master planning from the turn of the 19th century–compulsory dumbed-down schooling was founded on unions. They constantly diminish the interests of teachers as ever increasing numbers of non-instructional classified personnel, who exercise no direct educational function for students’ benefit, are continually hired, padding school-district employment rolls so that the expense per student continually rises with continually diminishing educational effectiveness, each new hire contributing union dues with no bargaining or interest advantage to the teachers who actually manage children, resulting in continually diminishing compensation. Union bosses comprise the top layer of an elite unable to be overthrown that relegates virtually all children to soul-prison from K-12 and beyond.
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Mr. Gatto calls schooling the largest public works project in history, the largest business in America and probably in the world. Textbook companies, testing companies, schooling paraphernalia and school-lunch suppliers–to diminish the autonomy of families and make the isolated individual dependent on government–educationist universities and the federal government, a gobsmacking breadth of interlocking economic and political interest-sectors, together constitute an immovable, self-interested institutional block to improving the prospects for children.
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The corporate consumerist and human resources management stakes in schooling have the effect that if children were ever to be taught self-reliance, autonomy and free thinking–public schools and colleges are far more rigidly doctrinaire than parochial-religious schools–if young people were ever to attain independence from the constant requirement of being taught what to think and minute oversight of what they do at all times, in schooling and employment, there would be a terrible crash in the existing, dependency-based economy.
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Dr. Feynman is known for having resisted the fierce NASA coverup of the Challenger Shuttle tragedy, demonstrating that fuel leakage from improperly seated O-rings caused the rocket explosion.

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Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt asserts that if your children are undergoing standardized testing (“only good for projecting how students will perform on subsequent standard tests, not how they will adapt to real-life challenges” – Mr. Gatto), whether in public, private, charter schools or even home-schools, they are under the system’s control. The only escape would be to go off the grid, something that is largely impossible under a worldwide control hierarchy that has turned away from enforcing its mandates through conflict to finessing its dictates in the most subtle social control system in human history, by fostering addictive divertissments to keep perpetual children of all ages constantly distracted, the calculated addiction-fostering of the social-media interface now seamlessly integrated with Skinnerian operant conditioning for lifelong cognitive tyranny, delivered with “wrap-around”/”pipeline services” in The Community School.

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s Belgian husband, Jan, remarked to her, that in Europe, beyond the reach of  Madison Ave. opinion engineering, these types of observations aren’t relegated to wearers of tinfoil hats, they are open, common knowledge. “Oh, of course! We were taught all about this in school.” You are in trouble with the authorities merely for reading this article.
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Author List

Along with lightweight DDD (deliberate dumbing down) raves by Bruce Deitrick Price, there is additional corroboration from Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley, the author of the extremely candid Tragedy and Hope–he didn’t necessarily disagree with the covert methods of the master controllers, he just wanted to publicize them–, Antony Sutton (whistleblower on Wall St. support for the Bolshevik Revolution and the Chinese Communist Long March, ejected from Stanford’s Hoover Institution, died alone, penniless, his notes thrown out), and continued by serious studies of the current world order by Patrick Wood (Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse Of Global Transformation).

This shortlink
http://www.sing-prayer.org/p/1281