THE PHILOSOPHY OF RESPONSIBLE FREEDOM: 35.Public Schools, The Fixation Of Belief, And Social Control
We Don’t Need No Education, We Don’t Need No Thought Control
Online, Free & Freeing: Friday, June 30, 9pm; Saturday, July 1, 9pm; Sunday, July 2, 9am; New Zealand time
PINK FLOYD - ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL, PART TWO
From Academy of Ideas transcript for our title video: The advent of compulsory public schooling in the West is often viewed as a sign of progress, a development which granted all individuals an equal opportunity to become educated, cultivate one’s cognitive faculties, and improve one’s position in life. But this optimistic view is not shared by all. Rather many who have studied the history of public education have concluded that its primary role, from the beginning, was not to uplift and enlighten, but to act as a form of social control.
The great American writer H.L. Mencken encapsulated this view: “The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence…Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians…and that is its aim everywhere else.” (H.L. Mencken) https://academyofideas.com/2016/12/public-schools-fixation-of-belief-social-control/
PERSONAL WORLD CLOCK https://tinyurl.com/bdef97z7
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We will view part or all of each below in numerical order:
1.PRISON VS. SCHOOL BuzzFeedVideo, March 20, 2014. Video 1:52
2.GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD Wikipedia
The General Education Board was a private organization which was used primarily to support higher education and medical schools in the United States. The Board was created in 1902 after John D. Rockefeller donated an initial $1 million (equivalent to $33,823,100 in 2022) to its cause.
Philosophy "In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are… So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Education_Board
3.JOHN D ROCKEFELLER FUNDED THE EDUCATION SYSTEM TO ENSLAVE US QIX Studio, June 8, 2023. Video 1:28
4.OUT OF THIS WORLD EDUCATION
“Balancing a checkbook, comprehending newspaper articles, and calculating the cost of gas are just a few tasks that many college seniors cannot handle…. [D]ata revealed that over 75% of 2-year college students and 50% of 4-year college students are incapable of completing everyday tasks.” – Morisi, S. (2012) Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent.
Current educational status in US
• Children are full-time schooled for 13 years
• 15,000 hours in school and on school work by the age of 18
• An average of $156,000 per public school child for 13 years of schooling
ELLWOOD PATTERSON CUBBERLEY, CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION, 1909 “… the attitude toward control of the child is likely to change. Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent… The plea in defense that ‘the child is my child’ will not be accepted much longer by society.”
HORACE MANN, LECTURES AND ANNUAL REPORTS (1867) P 210 “We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” “School is the cheapest police.” https://lifecentre.health/a-thinking-generation-notes-photos/a-thinking-generation-session-5-notes/
5.SCHOOLED – TRAILER Scott Ritsema—Belt of Truth, March 10, 2016. Video 1:48
Americans were once admired for their literacy, self-reliance, critical thought, and family values. After 100 years of compulsory schooling, however, Americans are now among the dumbest, most dependent, and most morally repugnant people on the planet. How did such a drastic change take place in such a short period of time? It was a well-funded and deliberate plan - a plan that you won't hear about from the mainstream media or in the establishment history textbooks. To the financial and political elite who built the system, American schooling had nothing to do with truly educating children. In two fast-paced, eye-opening sessions, Schooled uncovers the true intentions and designs of American schooling. Hear the clear, honest, and jaw-dropping admissions straight from the mouths of the architects of modern schooling. Understand the basic economic and social agenda behind this movement.
6.THE ORIGINS OF EDUCATION AND MANDATORY SCHOOLING
Prior to the late 1800’s, education was a private practice that took place in private institutions or through home schooling. That all changed in 1902 when John D. Rockefeller created the general education board in conjunction with Frederick T. Gates. Frederick T. Gates was a close friend, business and personal advisor to Rockefeller. The general education board was responsible for funding the American public school system, and provided over one hundred million dollars in 1902 while continuing their support beyond 1902. If we follow the money, the general education board was responsible for the creation of the American public school system. Does education not play a large role in manipulating the consciousness of human beings? https://corecougars.weebly.com/the-origins-of-education-and-mandatory-schooling.html
7.THE EVIL HISTORY OF OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM (Documentary) Jake Tran, April 26, 2023. Video 18:12
8.Mythographer--Intellectual Appropriation, Mutilation, Recontextualization and Critique--Occasional Letter Number One, 2006.
"Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life...It is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down. Every manufacturing establishment that turns out a standard product or series of products of any kind maintains a force of efficiency experts to study methods of procedure and to measure and test the output of its works...[Building pupils demands] continuous measurement of production to see if it is according to specifications [and] the elimination of waste in manufacture." Ellwood P. Cubberley, Stanford's Dean of Education, Public School Administration, 1916, page 338.
"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent." John Dewey https://tinyurl.com/2p884mm7
9.WE’VE BEEN SCHOOLED: A SHORT FILM ON AMERICAN EDUCATION Roman Roads Media, Sept 15, 2021 Video 11:00
The education system we are all most familiar with—a system that employs compulsory, age-graded, full-time instruction in a government institution—is actually a fairly recent approach to education, and in many ways, is no education at all. It’s social conditioning for the modern industrialized state. If you are surprised by the recent events surrounding the American public education system (i.e., introduction of CRT, COVID closures, co-ed bathrooms, etc), you may be even more shocked to discover that this kind of social conditioning has been the goal all along. "We’ve Been Schooled!"
10.SCHOOL IS PRISON—INTRO. Jose Perez, March 2, 2013. Video 2:46
11.WHY DON’T STUDENTS LIKE SCHOOL?” WELL, DUHHHH…. Psychology Today, Peter Gray, September 2, 2009 Children don't like school because they love freedom. https://tinyurl.com/58avvdx9
12.NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: A DECADE OF FAILURE The Cato Institute, Jan 7, 2012. Video 3:42
The No Child Left Behind Act was meant to compel states to adopt high standards and rapidly improve K-12 education in public schools. It is now clear that NCLB has been a failure and has set the stage for even greater federal control over curriculum. The solution, contrary to what many advocates claim, is to get the federal government out of America's classrooms. Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, comments on NCLB's decade of failure.
13.CHARLOTTE THOMSON ISERBYT Wikipedia
She was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930 and died on February 8, 2022.
She is known for writing the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book describes how the changes gradually brought into the American public education system work to eliminate the influences of a child's parents, and mold the child into a member of the proletariat in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future. She considers that these changes originated from plans formulated primarily by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education and Rockefeller General Education Board, and details the psychological methods used to implement and effect the changes.
She also wrote Back to Basics Reform, which documents her experiences working in the U.S. Dept. of Education, where she was privy to past and future plans to restructure American education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Thomson_Iserbyt
14.CHARLOTTE ISERBYT - DELIBERATELY CONSTRUCTED IDIOCRACY safvio, Oct 15, 2006 Video 9:35
Charlotte Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms (social constructionism).
15.THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA - A CHRONOLOGICAL PAPER TRAIL: A CHRONOLOGICAL PAPER TRAIL by Charlotte Iserbyt, Sept 1999
READER REVIEW ON AMAZON BOOKS
As an educator for the past 28 years, and believing myself to be at least a little left of center politically, I found "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" to be the scariest thing I have ever read. Some will brand this book as conservative propaganda. But those of us in the teaching profession wonder aloud to each other and anyone else who will listen, what politicians are thinking about when they pass educational reform legislation. It would seem impossible to make some of the decisions that are being made without having deliberately set about to wreak the education system in America. If the facts laid out in this book are true (and the book is full of documentation) what is happening to education in Washington D.C. is worse than the Twin Towers tragedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor combined. The promotional material for this book says that it should be required reading for parents. I think it should be required reading for every educator or university student considering a career in education. A difficult read, but eye opening to the point of being painful. https://www.amazon.com/deliberate-dumbing-down-america-Chronological/dp/0966707109/ref=sr_1_1
FREE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America
16.CLASP HIGHLIGHTED https://tinyurl.com/4sjy4hmx
FULL BOOK NO HIGHLIGHTS
https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DDDoA.pdf
THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA, Charlotte Iserbyt Website
https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/
17.THE DEATH OF FREE WILL By Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt https://tinyurl.com/2wwjp2d6
18.THE FINE PRINT, EP. 1 - THE LEIPZIG CONNECTION RD Bently, March 18, 2013. Video 3:33
In the final years of the last century, a great transformation began in American education. By the end of the first World War, Americans would notice increasingly a change in the way their children were being educated. In the succeeding decades, the same schools that once nurtured the American dream would become infested with drugs and crime, and high schools would be graduating students who could barely read, spell, or do simple arithmetic.
19.THE LEIPZIG CONNECTION BY PAOLO LIONNI 2013. AMAZON BOOKS
In the final years of the 19th century, a great transformation began in American education. By the end of the first world war, Americans would notice increasingly a change in the way their children were being educated. In the succeeding
decades, the same schools that once nurtured the American dream would become infested with drugs and crime, and high schools would be graduating students who could barely read, spell, or do simple arithmetic. The ongoing debasement of philosophy and ethics, and its social consequences, is a tangled tale. Those who would contend, with Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University in Germany, that history and its processes are responsible for the formation of individuals and their views (rather than the reverse) will undoubtedly find the approach in this book unpalatable; then again, not everyone would want this tale untangled. https://www.amazon.com/Leipzig-Connection-Paolo-Lionni-ebook/dp/B00C831VIW/ref=sr_1_1
FREE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
https://lib-zkg2yzvnukk46jfnzcbxfy3w.late.re/book/17263962/464a48
20.ANTHONY CODY ON THE GATES FOUNDATION EDUCATION AGENDA The Public School Wars, Dec 8, 2014. Video 0:46
Educator and Author Anthony Cody discusses The Gates Foundation Education Agenda in this promo for the 2015 education documentary "The Public School Wars," in production now.
21.150525 PSW IFP SPOTLIGHT DOCS v1 0 The Public School Wars, May 26, 2015. Video 12:22
22.THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH—A TEACHER CHALLENGES THE GATES FOUNDATION by Anthony Cody. AMAZON BOOKS
Can a teacher challenge the wealthiest man in the world? This is the question Garn Press asked in 2014 when Anthony Cody’s The Educator And The Oligarch was first published. The answer is a resounding “Yes!” https://tinyurl.com/y868kmfj
23.CRIMES OF THE EDUCATORS: HOW UTOPIANS ARE USING GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS TO DESTROY AMERICA'S CHILDREN by Samuel L. Blumenfeld and Alex Newman. AMAZON BOOKS
Utopian dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao are criminals – genocidal psychopaths who have killed more human beings in the last hundred years than any other ideologues in history. They don’t limit their murder to individuals, but to entire nations
In the United States another form of utopians, the "progressives," have tried to destroy traditional America by strategically dumbing down her people. America’s future is being crippled on purpose in order to fundamentally transform the nation, its values, and its system of government. Laid out a century ago by progressive luminary John Dewey, the fruits of his schemes are plain to see today. Dewey got rid of the traditional intensive phonics method of instruction and imposed a "look-say," "sight," or "whole-word" method that forces children to read English as if it were Chinese. The method is widely used in today’s public schools, which is a major reason there are so many failing public schools that cannot teach children the basics. This can only be considered a blatant form of child abuse.
American author and veteran educator Samuel Blumenfeld and journalist Alex Newman have taken on the public education establishment as never before and exposed it for the de facto criminal enterprise it is. https://tinyurl.com/3ahtvnht
FREE AUDIOBOOK https://www.bitchute.com/video/nF3fxpfLbsek/
24.THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA TO DUMB DOWN AMERICA’S CHILDREN—ALEX NEWMAN [Eagle Council Special] American Thought Leaders - The Epoch Times Sep 24, 2019. Video 15:12
At the 48th Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Council, we sat down with Alex Newman, author of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children.”
We discuss the high levels of illiteracy in America and what Alex Newman sees as the progressive agenda taking over the American school system to promote a collectivist, socialist, atheist worldview. And we look at what role individuals like John Dewey, Horace Mann, and Robert Owen played in transforming the US education system.
25.DATA MINING: THE CASE AGAINST COMMON CORE & NATIONAL STANDARDS FreedomProject Media, Feb 12, 2015. Video 5:43
26.CHILDREN'S PROGRAMMING FOR PROGRAMMING CHILDREN AND IMPACT FINANCE Alison McDowell, Jan 16, 2022. Video 3:04
27.SCHOOL WORLD ORDER—THE TECHNOCRATIC GLOBALIZATION OF CORPORATIZED EDUCATION by John Adam Klyczek, 2019. AMAZON BOOKS
For more than twenty years, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt has been warning the American people of the New World Order stratagem to overthrow democratically elected school boards with public-private partnerships between the federal government and globalist corporations. In this volume, John Klyczek expounds on Iserbyt's theories by tracing her work to the present moment as a last ditch effort to stop the corporatization of education. Klyczek explores how the infamous Yale Secret Society, Skull and Bones, utilized Robber Baron philanthropy and stimulus-response psychological conditioning to institute a corporatist system of workforce training for a fascistically planned economy. He then explains how this system is being upgraded to a technocratic education system of corporatist "school choice" through virtual education technologies that program students for a globally planned economy. School World Order will teach you the ulterior agenda behind the ed-tech movement: data-mining students for research and development into artificial intelligence and transhumanist biotechnologies for the establishment of an authoritarian, post-human society. https://www.amazon.com/School-World-Order-Technocratic-Globalization-ebook/dp/B07YYM5934/ref=sr_1_1
SCHOOL WORLD ORDER, WEBSITE https://www.schoolworldorder.info/
28.BILLIONAIRE BETSY DEVOS, BIG DATA, AND THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE PLANNED ECONOMY OpEdNews By John Klyczek
If cutting-edge educational technologies can scientifically maximize student learning, then why do so many Silicon Valley bigwigs at Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo! send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula , a school which bans computer technology from its classrooms? If high-tech computerization were such a fundamental enhancement to cognitive development, then why did Steve Jobs withhold iPads and other "screen-time" technologies from his children? Why would these tech gurus not practice for their own sons and daughters what they preach (and bankroll) for the public education system? These incongruences signal red flags that the real objective behind the accelerating push for personalized computer learning is not to boost academic outcomes, but to data-mine students for the purposes of corporate-fascist political-economic planning.
Enter US Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, a billionaire who has played both sides of the public-private fence as a supporter of federal Common Core data-mining as well as corporate charter schooling and privatized voucher programs. As President Trump's Education Secretary, we can expect DeVos to transfer the government data-mining policies of Common Core into a deregulated system of public-private "school choice" partnerships, which will open loopholes for private data-mining corporations to coopt public student data for the purposes of for-profit behavioral advertising and corporate-fascist workforce planning. https://www.opednews.com/articles/Billionaire-Betsy-DeVos-B-by-John-Klyczek-Amazon_Betsy-Devos_Corporations_Data-Base-170219-744.html
29.265 A REVIEW OF ESCAPE FROM CHILDHOOD BY JOHN HOLT tvlpodcast, Aug 29, 2017. Video 17:49
John Holt was a leading figure in the school reform movement, who became increasingly interested in how children learn outside of school—what he called “unschooling.” He wrote many influential books about alternatives to schooling and he helped start the modern homeschooling movement. His book Escape From Childhood provides a thought-provoking critique of how most adults treat children, and a vision of how we could treat children with dignity, giving them greater freedom. Show Notes: Escape From Childhood by John Holt TVL Discussion of Instead of Education by John Holt Previous TVL Episodes on Unschooling
30.PUBLIC SCHOOLS, THE FIXATION OF BELIEF, AND SOCIAL CONTROL Academy of Ideas, Dec 28, 2016. Video 12:36
https://academyofideas.com/2016/12/public-schools-fixation-of-belief-social-control/
The following is a transcript of this video.
The advent of compulsory public schooling in the West is often viewed as a sign of progress, a development which granted all individuals an equal opportunity to become educated, cultivate one’s cognitive faculties, and improve one’s position in life.
But this optimistic view is not shared by all. Rather many who have studied the history of public education have concluded that its primary role, from the beginning, was not to uplift and enlighten, but to act (**)as a form of social control.
The great American writer H.L. Mencken encapsulated this view:
“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence…Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians…and that is its aim everywhere else.” (H.L. Mencken)
The roots of compulsory education reach back to Ancient Greece where Spartan children were taken from their parents and housed in military schools under the ideal of cultivating total obedience to the Spartan state. The more modern form of compulsory public schooling, however, originated in the 16th century.
In 1524, Martin Luther, a primary figure in the Protestant Revolution – which amounted to a rejection of the Roman Catholic Church in favor of the Bible as the sole authority of truth – wrote a letter to the German leaders of the time, urging them to institute a mandatory schooling system. Luther’s letter reads as follows:
“I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school…. If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle…and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.” (Martin Luther)
Luther understood that compulsory schooling could be used to indoctrinate young minds into the Lutheran Church, and sought to use State power to achieve this end. As a result of his pleadings, numerous German states created the first modern public schools.
In many ways Martin Luther can be thought of marking the birth of the modern schooling system. Not only was he the first advocate of compulsory schooling, but his conviction that the State should use its power to indoctrinate its citizens into a specific worldview, helped stimulate in Germany a climate of increasing subjugation to the State.
The great historian Lord Acton wrote of Martin Luther that he “impressed on his party that character of political dependence, and that habit of passive obedience to the State.”
Another important step in the rise of modern public schooling arose under King William I of Prussia who ruled from 1713 to 1740. Integral to the maintenance of Prussia’s powerful army during his reign was the national compulsory schooling system he established in 1717, the first of its kind in Europe. Subsequent schooling reforms throughout the 18th century built on this foundation and paved the way towards the development of what came to known as the factory model of schooling.
In her book Raising a School, Rena Upitis, the former Dean of Education at Queen’s University in Canada, explained some of the features of the factory model of schooling, which continues to be the dominant model of public schooling in the West today:
“In factory schools, teaching—like the buildings—tends to be boxlike and linear. Transmission teaching dominates: standing at the front of the classroom, the teacher transmits knowledge to the students. This kind of teaching works best when the teacher can see everyone at once, and so, classrooms are created as a series of boxes, the most pervasive example being one of double-loaded classrooms down a single long hallway.” (Raising a School, Rena Upitis)
The factory model of schooling emphasizes standardization of teaching, testing, and learning rates, respect for authority over the exploration of truth, and uniformity and orthodoxy over innovation and progress.
This schooling model developed by the Prussians was so efficient at inculcating into its citizens a worldview which benefited the Prussian State, that in the 19th century educational reformers in the United States caught wind of it, and quickly sought to implement it in their home country.
Both Calvin Stowe, one of the leading American professional educationists in the 19th century, and Horace Mann, dubbed by historians as the “Father of the American Public School System”, traveled to Prussia to investigate their schooling system first hand. Upon their return both lobbied heavily, and successfully, for the adoption of factory model schools in the United States.
Under the influence of Mann, Stowe, and other educational reformers, many American states quickly began to develop state-sponsored compulsory schooling systems which crowded out the prevailing system of private and philanthropic schools already in existence. In 1852 Massachusetts was the first to adopt such a system, and by 1900 practically all the states had followed.
Compulsory schooling elsewhere in the West followed a similar trajectory and timeline. In 1900 every country in Europe had established compulsory schooling except for Belgium, which followed in 1920. England, after much opposition, implemented compulsory schooling in the late 19th century. And Canada quickly accompanied America in implementing a system based on the factory model developed in Prussia.
Many of the educational reformers who influenced the development of compulsory schooling were not looking to stimulate innovation, invention and the development of ideas to promote social prosperity, but were in search of an effective means of social control and social engineering.
Ellwood Cubberley, Head of Stanford’s School of Education and influential reformer, for example, wrote in his 1916 book Public School Administration:
“Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” (Public School Administration, Ellwood Cubberley)
William Torrey Harris, the United States Commissioner of Education in the late 19th century, and steadfast believer that the child was the absolute property of the government, wrote in his book (**)The Philosophy of Education:
“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” (The Philosophy of Education, William Torrey Harris)
Frederick Taylor Gates, business advisor to John D. Rockefeller, who in 1903 founded the General Education Board which provided major funding for schools and was a big supporter of state-controlled compulsory schooling, wrote in his 1913 book “The Country School of Tomorrow”:
“In our dream…the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand…We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply…For the task that we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: to train these people as we find them for a perfectly ideal life just where they are…an idyllic life under the skies and within the horizon, however narrow, where they first open their eyes.” (The Country School of Tomorrow, Frederick Taylor Gates)
To keep the student confined to a narrow horizon, or in the words of Mencken, to use compulsory schooling to “breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality”, was the goal of many of the most influential educational reformers.
To understand just how efficient the factory model of schooling was, and continues to be, at achieving this goal on a mass scale, we can turn to an interesting essay titled “The Fixation of Belief” by the prominent philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In the essay Peirce explained how it was possible “to fix belief, not in the individual, but in the community”, via what he called the “method of authority”:
“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young; having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated, or expressed. Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror.” (The Fixation of Belief, Charles Sanders Peirce)
One would be hard pressed to think of a better system for fixing belief for the purpose of breeding and training a standardized citizenry, than the factory model schooling system, in existence in the West since the late 19th century.
As Ivan Illich wrote in his book, Deschooling society:
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” (Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich)
It is not surprising that a study of 400 eminent 20th century men and women, detailed in the book Cradles of Eminence, found that three out of every five of them “had serious school problems”. Those individuals who yearn to push boundaries, explore and create ideas, invent, and innovate, will not easily bend to a system which attempts “to put down dissent and originality”.
Albert Einstein, for example, found schooling so suffocating – requiring in his words “the obedience of a corpse” – that upon passing an exam he had previously failed he found he had no desire to think about scientific problems for an entire year.
Ignoring for a moment the sinister motives which lay behind the development of factory model schooling in the West, its inadequacy as an institution is conditioned upon its tendency to not only fail to stimulate curiosity, but to inhibit or even stamp out altogether the natural curiosity exhibited by all children.
Stuck within the confines of what Rena Upitis described as “Windowless concrete containers, surrounded by barbed wire fences – looking more like prisons than schools”, students are for the most part not encouraged to explore, create, and cultivate independence, but to sit down, listen, and accept at face value whatever is being taught.
We’ll conclude with a passage from John Taylor Gatto, former New York City and New York state teacher of the year, who upon resigning out of frustration over the faults he believed to be embedded in the very essence of modern schooling, wrote a series of books on the history and nature of compulsory schooling.
The following is a short passage from his book Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, in which he makes a sharp distinction between what today is called schooling, and what an education should really consist of:
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing…it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.” (Dumbing us Down, John Taylor Gatto)
EXTRAS
AMERICA’S EDUCATION WATCH (Note: many links to all things Dumbing Us Down) http://www.americaseducationwatch.org/
REPORT ON THE COMMISSION ON SOCIAL STUDIES—CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE COMMISSION A.C. Krey, Chairman, 1934
“Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies”, funded by the tax-exempt Carnegie Corporation of New York, published in 1934, is the most important report ever written on the future of American education. All its recommendations and its philosophy are an intrinsic part of education in the United States today. Professor Harold Laski, a philosopher of British socialism, said of this report: “At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a ‘Socialist America’. One excerpt from this important report reads “The implications for education are clear and imperative: (a) the efficient functioning of the emerging economy and the full utilization of its potentialities require profound changes in the attitudes and outlook of the American people, especially the rising generation–a complete and frank recognition that the old order is passing, that the new order is emerging, (pp. 34-35).
FULL BOOK WITH HIGHLIGHTS
FULL BOOK NO HIGHLIGHTS
EXPOSING THE GLOBAL ROAD TO RUIN THROUGH EDUCATION
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (Actor), Cynthia Weatherly (Actor) Format DVD
This eight-disc video/DVD set of presentations and written submissions, including ones by Charlotte Iserbyt, Samuel Blumenfeld, Dennis Cuddy, Edward Griffin, Rosa Koire, Anita Hoge, Jeannie Georges, et al, is the result of two 2-day conferences, held in Maine and Georgia, August 2012 and August 2013. Fifteen of the nation's most respected education and political researchers, writers, and speakers, including public school teachers - some in the trenches since 1965 - were videotaped. A special roundtable discussion involving researcher/activists Karen Bracken and Kelleigh Nelson, Tennessee, and Diane Kepus, Karen Schoen, and Debbie Gunnoe, Florida, provides up-to-date information related to Common Core, tax-funded school choice and charter schools with their unelected boards. Written submissions are included from the speakers, as well as from those who could not attend the conference. One is offered a banquet of written works, including rich history, from great patriots and recognized writers active from 1960-2000; i.e., Jacqueline and Malcolm Lawrence, Joan Masters, Elizabeth Trotto, Peggy Cuddy, and from equally talented individuals no longer with us: the late Maureen Heaton, Don Bell, Jo Hindman, Bettye Lewis, and Ruth Feld. . This impeccable research is your tool kit: ammunition to fight and win the government/corporate/tax-exempt foundation-funded war against our children and grandchildren, and against our free constitutional republic, very aptly illustrated by Joel Pett, Pultizer Prize-winning cartoonist in his 1983 Phi Delta Kappan cartoon.
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Charlotte-Thomson-Iserbyt/dp/0985553847
" HORACE MANN " AMERICAN EDUCATOR & EDUCATIONAL REFORMER 1940s DOCUMENTARY XD50124 Periscope Film, May 8, 2022 Video 18:28
This 1940s black and white film titled “Horace Mann” is an educational film that details the life and career of Horace Mann (1796 – 1859), an American educational reformer and Whig politician known for his commitment to promoting public education. This documentary was presented by Encyclopedia Britannica Films in collaboration with Dr. E.L.F. Williams of Heidelberg College and produced in affiliation with Emerson Film Corporation. It utilizes scripted reenactments of Horace Mann at various stages of his life from his childhood to the end of his career as a professor at Antioch College. Shot of John Harvard monument on Harvard University campus (0:28). Scene of Franklin, Massachusetts birthplace of Horace Mann (0:44). A young Horace Mann at a school house (0:57). University Hall of Brown University (1:45). College-aged Horace Mann receiving an invitation from the president of the United States, James Madison (1:54). Horace Mann giving a speech at university graduation (3:11). Horace Mann teaching at Brown University (3:33). His wife, Charlotte Messer Mann, bringing him tea (3:46). Death of Charlotte Messer Mann (3:53). Working in Boston at the Massachusetts State Senate (4:10). Meeting with Massachusetts governor Edward Everett and other politicians (5:24). Horace Mann accepts the position of secretaryship of Massachusetts’ first Board of Education (8:02). Horace Mann presenting ideas on education to a public audience (8:31). Receiving the governor and another politician to his home office to persuade them to pass more legislation and discussing his magazine the Common School Journal (8:49). Children running towards a newly built school house (10:47). Horace Mann riding in carriage with Massachusetts businessman Mr. Dwight (11:00). Campus of one of the first three normal teachers’ schools in Massachusetts (12:41). Horace Mann discussing a book with his second wife, Mary Peabody of Boston (12:50). Horace Mann facing controversy from writings in a recent publication (13:08). Mary and Horace walking through the home that they are building together in West Newton, Massachusetts (14:33). Horace Mann greeting a politician who is hoping he will replace John Quincy Adams in the house of representatives (15:29). Shot of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. (16:44). Daniel Webster making his famous Compromise Speech which alienated Horace Mann from the Whig Party (16:53). Antioch Hall of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (17:06). Horace Mann giving a commencement speech at Antioch College (17:17). Shot of Horace Mann’s grave at North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island (17:46). Montage of various educational institutions in the United States ending with the Horace Mann School (17:55). We encourage viewers to add comments and, especially, to provide additional information about our videos by adding a comment! See something interesting? Tell people what it is and what they can see by writing something for example: "01:00:12:00 -- President Roosevelt is seen meeting with Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference."
MY COMMENT:
MANN THE LIFEBOATS?
6 Problematic Quotes from the Founder of America’s Education System by Daniel Lattier, Sept 25, 2015
1. “Men are cast-iron, but children are wax.”
Mann gave up his practice of law because he wanted to mold people, and he found that adults are not as malleable as children.
Today’s education system is increasingly accused of indoctrinating children at young ages with ideologies at odds with those of their parents.
Not included in his 6:
“We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
School is the cheapest police.” Horace Mann
6 PROBLEMATIC QUOTES FROM THE FOUNDER OF AMERICA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM September 25, 2015, Daniel Lattier
1. “Men are cast-iron, but children are wax.”
Mann gave up his practice of law because he wanted to mold people, and he found that adults are not as malleable as children.
Today’s education system is increasingly accused of indoctrinating children at young ages with ideologies at odds with those of their parents.
2. “The new-born infant must have sustenance and shelter and care. If the natural parents are removed or parental ability fails, in a word, if parents either cannot or will not supply the infant’s wants,–then society at large-the government having assumed to itself the ultimate control of all property-is bound to step in and fill the parent’s place.”
Mann strongly believed that schools needed to act in loco parentis – “in the place of the parents” – if a child’s parents were not up to the task of proper child-rearing.
Today’s education system is taking on the task of child-care at earlier ages. Many school systems provide not only lunch, but breakfast for their students.
COMPULSORY EDUCATION AS SOCIAL CONTROL DAVID S. D’AMATO
Libertarian perspectives on education are important particularly insofar as both the necessity and historical inevitability of compulsory, state-run schooling are today simply taken for granted by almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy. In taking this system for granted, its proponents have given credibility to the insidious notion that it is somehow non-ideological, or ideologically neutral, or occupying a space somehow “outside” of ideology. It is not. Rather, compulsory, state-run schooling is heavily laden with controversial and indeed authoritarian ideological commitments and balanced on a series of tendentious premises. Much of this ideological foundation was “invented by the state when it began a new programme of social control through mass compulsory education.” 1 Rather than undertaking to trace the history of compulsory government schooling, here we will be concerned with this: the ideological content of this system, and its important role as a means of social control.
“School,” writes John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling , “is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.”
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/compulsory-education-social-control
THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY by Charles Eisenstein
The Age of Separation, the Age of Reunion, and the convergence of crises that is birthing the transition
CHAPTER V: THE WORLD UNDER CONTROL
School is the cheapest police. — Horace Mann
But who can unlearn all the facts that I’ve learned
As I sat in their chairs and my synapses burned
And the torture of chalk dust collects on my tongue
Thoughts follow my vision and dance in the sun
All my vasoconstrictors they come slowly undone
Can’t this wait till I’m old? Can’t I live while I’m young? — Phish
No discussion of control would be complete without some attention to modern schooling, the linchpin of the program to subjugate the inner wilderness—human nature—just as we use technology to dominate the outer.
Why do we go to school? The universal response is, “To learn”, and here we encounter the primary contradiction of modern schooling that leads us to all the others. For if the purpose of school is that children may learn, then school is quite evidently not working.
https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-5-06/
GLOBAL ROAD TO RUIN THROUGH EDUCATION- PREVIEW Charlotte Iserbyt, June 22, 2013 Video 26:24
EXPOSING THE GLOBAL ROAD TO RUIN THROUGH EDUCATION
https://www.scribd.com/document/217011060/Exposing-the-Global-Road-to-Ruin-through-Education#
CHARLOTTE ISERBYT YOUTUBE CHANNEL (Note: this has many of the videos that are in the above 8 DVD set you can buy on Amazon.). 38 Videos
EXPOSING THE GLOBAL ROAD TO RUIN THROUGH EDUCATION
https://www.youtube.com/@iserbyt3DResearch/videos
HISTORY... CONNECTED: THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA W/ CHARLOTTE ISERBYT Richard Grove, Nov 19, 2013. Video 1:13:24
ALONGSIDE COMMON CORE, THE FEDS ARE DATA-MINING YOUR KIDS VisionLiberty, Oct 30, 2013. Video 5:03
Veteran educator Mary Black explains how, contrary to establishment claims, Common Core and the federal government's broader education "reform" agenda will indeed vacuum up huge amounts of information on American children for data-mining and other purposes.
GOVERNMENT MONEY FOR HOMESCHOOL - ALEX NEWMAN Homeschool Insights Podcast Jun 19, 2023 Video 2:44
Award-winning international journalist, educator, author, speaker, and president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc, Alex Newman, exposes the indoctrination, sexualization, and dumbing down of America’s children by government schools. You will not want to miss this inside look at the public education machine, from the co-author of the groundbreaking book, Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children, which Alex wrote with Samuel Blumenfeld.
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH COMMON CORE? Schoolhouse Rocked, Oct 10, 2020 Video 7:29
Is Common Core really so bad? Isn't it just a set of standards for education?
Alex Newman discusses the truth about the Common Core standards with Yvette Hampton and Aby Rinella on The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast.
ALEX NEWMAN, FREEDOMPROJECT MEDIA, 176 Videos
FREEDOMPROJECT MEDIA Youtube Channel 260 videos
https://www.youtube.com/@FreedomProjectMedia
UPDATE: FROM THE NOXIOUS NINETIES THROUGH THE TERRIBLE TWOS By Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt
(You know it’s true when it happens to you!)
Since the 1999 publication of the deliberate dumbing down
of america: A Chronological Paper Trail, we have ushered in a new decade
and millennium. The long-awaited 2000s are with us—“the terrible twos.”
Some legislative initiatives aimed at the year 2000 have had to be renamed
or reformulated (America 2000, Goals 2000) because they did not meet their
target goal of being in effect by the year 2000. We can thank the good Lord
and strong-hearted Americans who saw through these proposals for what
they were and rejected them out of hand.
SCHOOL IS A PRISON DR PETER GRAY INTERVIEW eqivideos, March 18, 2012. Video 44:59
THE DARK TRUTH OF THE SCHOOL SYSTEM (WHY IT SUCKS) Austyn Crispell Dec 31, 2020 Video 6:45
We adopted an industrialist school system in America and the way we teach hasn't changed much compared to the rest of society. In the early 1900's, the school system was amazing for most Americans! However, since the introduction of the internet, we have not seen nearly as much innovation. Here is The Dark Truth of The School System and why it sucks.
ROCKEFELLER MONOPOLY, WORK, SLAVE SCHOOL EDUCATION Swalklanexw Dallas Guss May 26, 2021. Video. 7:07
WHAT IS DESCHOOLING? Fairly Educational, April 25, 2020. Video 5:48
HOW THE “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND” ACT FAILED ON EVERY LEVEL iilluminaughtii, Oct 27, 2022. Video 29:19
In the early 2000s, something seemed abundantly clear in the United States; the country was falling behind the rest of the world in education. With the academics dropping and, coincidentally, the military enrollment, the government decided it was time to come up with a plan. So, the No Child Left Behind Act was brought into existence. At first, everyone seemed hopeful that the new plan in American education would make a difference—and it did. But, not the kind the United States was searching for.
00:00 No Child Left Behind 02:54 The Beginning of No Child Left Behind 07:11 Recruiting Your Kids In The Name of Education 11:15 Leaving Children Behind 17:35 The Revamp 23:57 AD 25:07 What Could Be Done 28:25 Outro
THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA WeAreChange March 11, 2014. Video 8:30
In this video, Luke Rudkowski speaks with Department of Education whistleblower Charlette Iserbyt about the deliberate dumbing down of America. The former US Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor suggests that our educational system is not based on children learning. Is the Carnegie foundation instrumental in developing a socialist-collectivist style educational system that is detrimental to our youth? Is this impacting the development of the general population through our school systems?
SOVIETS IN THE CLASSROOM: America’s Latest Education Fad by Charlotte Iserbyt
https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Soviets_in_Classroom.pdf
DESCHOOLING SOCIETY SUMMARY (IVAN ILLICH) - WHAT DID IVAN ILLICH BELIEVE? 8SA - Books, Days, Dreams, Biographies, Summaries, March 19, 2022. Video 4:02
In Deschooling Society Ivan Illich argued that a good education system should have three purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it from them; and to create opportunities ...
Has taken a while but might check in tomorrow night.