THE PHILOSOPHY OF RESPONSIBLE FREEDOM: 36.Why Public Schools And The Mainstream Media Dumb Us Down (& Handcuff & Taser Us)
Free & Freeing--Friday, July 7, 9pm; Saturday, July 8, 9pm; Sunday, July 9, 9am New Zealand time
HANDCUFFS, LEG SHACKLES AND TASERS THE NEW FACE OF PUNISHMENT IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS RutherfordInstitute, Feb 5, 2015 Video 6:48
Why Public Schools And The Mainstream Media Dumb Us Down Transcript from Academy of Ideas:
“Resist much, obey little; Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved; Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
These were the words of caution which the great poet Walter Whitman offered to his fellow Americans. For Whitman recognized that crucial to a free and flourishing society are men and women who are willing to question, and even resist authority when necessary. But today very few of us live by the ideal espoused by Whitman, rather blind obedience is the norm. We have become populations of sheep, easily to be herded into the chains of tyranny.
But what has led those of us in the West to largely shun the advice of Whitman? In this video we will examine two institutions that have played an integral role in the breeding of a passive citizenry – the compulsory state-run education system, which in North America is called the public school system, and the mainstream media. https://academyofideas.com/2019/03/public-schools-mainstream-media-dumb-us-down/
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The below will be viewed in part or whole in numerical order:
1.SCHOOLS ARE PRISONS RjWeapon, April 6, 2010 Video 5:08
2.19 STATES ALLOW CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS | MORNING IN AMERICA NewsNation, Aug 30, 2022. Video 3:23
3.HANDCUFFS, LEG SHACKLES AND TASERS THE NEW FACE OF PUNISHMENT IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS RutherfordInstitute, Feb 5, 2015 Video 6:48 On any given school day, kids who “act up” in class can be pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.” Certainly, as John Whitehead argues in this week's vodcast, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools—and something needs to be done about it.
4.THE WAR ON KIDS | FULL MOVIE (2022) Fallen World Films Premiered Jul 23, 2022 Video. 1:48:21
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.” Vladimir Lenin
“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6
5."SCHOOLS ARE DANGEROUS" - JOHN TAYLOR GATTO RED PILLS C-SPAN John Taylor Gatto TV, Dec 27, 2018. Video 2:37
6."VOLUNTARY SCHOOLING IN A VOLUNTARY SOCIETY" - JOHN TAYLOR GATTO John Taylor Gatto TV, Nov 20, 2016. 192 Videos. Video 2:37
7.HOMESCHOOLING: PARENT RIGHTS ABSOLUTISM VS. CHILD RIGHTS TO EDUCATION & PROTECTION Elizabeth Bartholet, 2020
This Article describes the rapidly growing homeschooling phenomenon and the threat it poses to children and society. Homeschooling activists have in recent decades largely succeeded in their deregulation campaign, overwhelming legislators with aggressive advocacy. As a result, parents can now keep their children at home in the name of homeschooling free from any real scrutiny as to whether or how they are educating their children. Many homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives. Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science. Abusive parents can keep their children at home free from the risk that teachers will report them to child protection services. Some homeschool precisely for this reason. This Article calls for a radical transformation in the homeschooling regime and a related rethinking of child rights. It recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool. https://arizonalawreview.org/homeschooling-parent-rights-absolutism-vs-child-rights-to-education-protection/
8.HARVARD SAYS HOMESCHOOLING SHOULD BE BANNED BUT HOMESCHOOLERS OUTPERFORM THOSE AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS BY NEARLY EVERY METRIC EVIE, by Keelia Clarkson, April 24, 2020
In the most recent weeks, our country has seen millions of kids staying home from school, leaving some parents with no choice but to start homeschooling — giving them a peek into the everyday life of the few and far between homeschooling families around the country. https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/harvard-hating-on-homeschoolers-isnt-just-about-education-its-about-freedom
9.HARVARD LAW PLOTS ATTACK ON HOMESCHOOLING & PARENTAL RIGHTS FreedomProject Media, Apr 3, 2020. Video 8:42
Extremists at Harvard Law School are planning a summit about the allegedly “controversial practice” of homeschooling, sparking alarm and ridicule among home-education experts and advocates. The controversial gathering comes amid escalating attacks on educational freedom, many of them funded by tax money. The goal of the Harvard event is simple: Advance the ongoing war on parental rights and educational liberty. Unsurprisingly, the summit at the overpriced and increasingly radical university is inviting only anti-homeschooling-freedom activists, while excluding proponents and even neutral experts familiar with the mountains of data supporting the benefits of home education.
10.HOMESCHOOLING: PROTECTING FREEDOM, PROTECTING CHILDREN
The Cato Institute Streamed live on Jun 16, 2020 Video 1:33:22
Long before COVID-19 forced almost all children to receive education at home, homeschooling—a parental decision to educate their children at home—was growing.
For advocates, its purpose and value is to open space for diversity, enabling families to provide education different from what any school offers. Critics fear that it isolates children from the myriad people and ideas in society and can enable child abuse to go unchecked.
These positions have recently come into high‐profile conflict and seem irreconcilable. Are they? Or do both sides have legitimate concerns that can be resolved through compromise? Join us for this timely discussion.
𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠...
𝐄𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐡 𝐁𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐭, Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Child Advocacy Program, Harvard University
𝐊𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐌𝐜𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝 (@Kerry_edu), Adjunct Scholar, The Cato Institute, and author of "Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well‐Educated Children outside the Conventional Classroom"
11.EP. 245 – PROFESSOR VS. MOM: BATTLE OVER HOMESCHOOLING FreedomProjectMedia, Jan 23, 2020. Video 26:42
On this episode of the “Dr. Duke Show” we're analyzing a recent debate that took place between a Harvard-educated homeschool advocate and a Harvard professor who believes homeschooling is child abuse. Let the games begin.
12.HARVARD PROF’S STRANGE CLAIMS ABOUT HOMESCHOOLERS DEBUNKED—BY HARVARD’S OWN RESEARCH FEE, by Andrew Reder, December 3, 2021
Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet has been a major opponent of homeschool education in recent years. But do her claims withstand scrutiny?https://fee.org/articles/harvard-prof-s-strange-claims-about-homeschoolers-debunked-by-harvard-s-own-research/
13.NEW HARVARD STUDY: HOMESCHOOLERS TURN OUT HAPPY, WELL-ADJUSTED, AND ENGAGED. FEE, by Kerry McDonald, Nov 17, 2021
Homeschooled children fared better than children who attended public schools in many categories. https://fee.org/articles/new-harvard-study-homeschoolers-turn-out-happy-well-adjusted-and-engaged/
14.HIGH MARKS FOR HOME-SCHOOLING Concordia University, 2012
A conversation with Sandra MARTIN-CHANG and Wendi HADD https://www.concordia.ca/news/articles/2012/high-marks-for-homeschooling.html
15.ARE HOME-SCHOOLED CHILDREN SMARTER? Concordia University, Nov 7, 2012 Video 40:18 http://concordia.ca/headlines
Research conducted by Sandra Martin-Chang, an assistant professor in Concordia's Department of Education, shows that children who were home-schooled scored higher than their peers in seven different subjects. In this segment, she discusses the challenges and rewards of assuming responsibility for your child's learning with Wendi Hadd, a sociology teacher at John Abbott College who home-schooled her children.
16.HOMESCHOOLING IN CHINA Echo in Quito, Aug 27, 2022 Video 5:00
This is a video for Module 1of Teach-Now Teacher Preparation certification Program.
17.PARENTS REJECT CHINA'S CLASSROOMS FOR HOME SCHOOLING AFP News Agency, Aug 28, 2012 Video 2:11
China's schools are famed for their strict approach and for achieving great results. But more and more Chinese parents believe the state education is too rigid and are opting to take their children out of school and teach them from home.
18.HOMESCHOOL IN CHINA Hannah Yuh, Dec 4, 2020 Video 8:37
An inclusive documentary on homeschool students in China! Why did they choose to homeschool? How do they arrange their day? Is there any social life? Their future plans? All in this video!
19.COMPULSORY SCHOOLING LAWS: WHAT IF WE DIDN'T HAVE THEM? FEE, October 5, 2018
Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of schooling on education. https://fee.org/articles/compulsory-schooling-laws-what-if-we-didnt-have-them/
20.JOHN HOLT - EDUCATION AND CHILDREN (Video Re-Edit) Mike Lamentola, Jan 24, 2014. Video 2:52 Mix—John Holt—Education and Children (Series of Videos)
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of unschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory
21.WHY PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA DUMB US DOWN Academy of Ideas, March 20, 2019 Video 10:45
The following is a transcript of this video.
“Resist much, obey little; Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved; Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
These were the words of caution which the great poet Walter Whitman offered to his fellow Americans. For Whitman recognized that crucial to a free and flourishing society are men and women who are willing to question, and even resist authority when necessary. But today very few of us live by the ideal espoused by Whitman, rather blind obedience is the norm. We have become populations of sheep, easily to be herded into the chains of tyranny.
But what has led those of us in the West to largely shun the advice of Whitman? In this video we will examine two institutions that have played an integral role in the breeding of a passive citizenry – the compulsory state-run education system, which in North America is called the public school system, and the mainstream media.
Public schooling is viewed as one of the shining lights of the modern Western world. Who could question the value of an institution that provides free and compulsory education for all? But as with many institutions of our day the textbook picture of how the institution should work, greatly diverges from the reality of how it does work. If public schools taught individuals how to think, if they promoted intellectual curiosity and produced citizens healthy in body and mind, then few would question their value. But beneath the veneer presented by the bureaucrats that run this institution, a darker reality emerges.
Or as John Taylor Gatto, a former teacher, turned one of public schooling’s greatest critics, writes:
“Schools are intended to produce…formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but…in a national order in which the only “successful” people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic…the products of schooling are…irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.” John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing us Down
Noam Chomsky echoed this sentiment, writing in his book Understanding Power:
“…given the external power structure of the society in which they function the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated.” Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power
To some this may sound like heresy, but a study of history reveals that this was the intention from the very start. The state run school systems in the West were modeled off the factory style of education first introduced in Prussia in the early 1700s.
“. . .what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace “manageable”.” John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction
Albert Einstein, an individual who reached heights of genius rarely seen, did not credit his compulsory schooling with his intellectual development. Reflecting back on his school years, Einstein noted that after completing his final examinations his interest in the field he would go on to revolutionize was all but dead: “I found the consideration of scientific problems” he wrote “distasteful to me for an entire year”. Einstein believed that one of the major flaws of compulsory, state run education systems is their forced style teaching: “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle”, he wrote, “that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist
After well over a decade of indoctrination in the school system, few emerge with a great thirst for knowledge and a curiosity toward the many mysteries of the world. Instead, as Bruce Levine writes in his book Resisting Illegitimate Authority, by the time a student graduates they have been bred “to be passive; to be directed by others; to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authority; to pretend to care about things that they do not care about; and that one is impotent to change one’s dissatisfying situation.” (Bruce Levine, Resisting Illegitimate Authority) But if our schooling cannot be relied upon to generate the critical and curious minds needed to protect a society from the actions of corrupted authorities, can the mainstream media play this role?
While there has been an increasing skepticism toward this institution in recent years, distaste and distrust toward the mainstream media has a long history:
“I have given up newspapers, in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier.” Thomas Jefferson
Nietzsche, one of the most intellectually free and curious minds of history, was also no fan of the mainstream media: “Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Richard Weaver, a professor at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 20th century, found it ironic that while we have freed ourselves from the earth-centered view of the cosmos, we have all the while dove headlong into an illusory view of the world created by the mainstream media. And while Weaver focuses on newspapers in the following passage, as they were the dominant medium of his day, his words are even more applicable today, where modern technology offers far better tools for the manipulation of the masses:
“A great point is sometimes made of the fact that modern man no longer sees above his head a revolving dome with fixed stars…True enough, but he sees something similar when he looks at his daily newspaper…The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forebear of the thirteenth century…think of questioning the cosmology.” Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
But why does the mainstream media so often choose deception over truth? Noam Chomsky in his book Media Control, suggests that like many politicians, the mainstream media is dominated by individuals who adhere to an elitist ideology. The 20th century American journalist Walter Lippmann epitomized this view, calling the masses “the bewildered herd” and suggesting that one of the main functions of the media is to put this herd in its proper place as passive spectators, not active participants, in the organization of a society.
Or as Chomsky explains this elitist ideology is built on the notion that:
“…that the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they’re just going to cause trouble. Therefore, it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this. We have to tame the bewildered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things.” Noam Chomsky, Media Control
For those of us who are not among the self-anointed elite, the question arises as to whether the controlling of the bewildered herd is done in order to promote a prosperous and flourishing society, or merely to maintain certain institutional structures which favour the elites to the detriment of society at large. This open question only reinforces the need for a more skeptical attitude toward the authority figures of our day. We need, in other words, more anti-authoritarians.
It must be stressed that an anti-authoritarian is not someone who in place of a passive acceptance of authority, adopts a passive rejection of all authority. Many institutions and authority figures serve a beneficial purpose and therefore should be accepted. But anti-authoritarians recognize that consensus does not mean truth, that power corrupts, that people lie, and that some institutions in the words of Chomsky “have no moral justification…they are just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination.” (Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism) Recognizing these undeniable facts, the anti-authoritarian is willing to look at all authority figures with a healthy dose of skepticism, and potentially even resist their commands, if such authority proves corrupt and harmful to the well-being of a society.
Or as Henry David Thoreau wrote:
“If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” (Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience) Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
But should we fear a world with more anti-authoritarians? The obedience bred into us in school and the blind deference to authority promoted by the talking heads of the mainstream media, may lead some to view anti-authoritarians as a threat to the stability of society. But nothing could be further from the truth. Anti-authoritarians are the crucial protectors of a flourishing society.
For as the author C.P. Snow noted:
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.” CP Snow, Public Affairs 1971
Malevolent authority, combined with a passive citizenry is the recipe for tyranny and so anti-authoritarians should not be feared or ostracized, they should be welcomed. They are the individuals who raise the alarm and awaken the slumbering masses to the existence of corrupt authority. A society without a healthy number of anti-authoritarians, or a society in which anti-authoritarians are shunned and silenced, is a society that has chosen the comfort of illusions, over the desire for truth, and is therefore a society paving the way for its own destruction.
For as the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire cautioned:
“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious or otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” Voltaire