dumbing us down pt. 3

dumbing us down
by john taylor gatto

more quotes & notes:

a big part of what education is about is discovering meaning and a satisfying purpose for yourself. [p. 68]

“One of the surest ways to recognize education is that it doesn’t cost very much; it doesn’t depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the self-awareness that propels it are nearly free. It is hard to turn a dollar on education. But schooling is a wonderful hustle, getting sharper all the time.” [p. 77]

“Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell…saw that mass schooling in the United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it was a scheme to artificially deliver national unity by eliminating human variation and by eliminating the forge that produces variation: the family. According to Lord Russel, mass-schooling produced a recognizably American student: anti-intellectual, superstitious, lacking self-confidence, and with less of what Russell called “inner freedom” than his or her counterpart in any other nation he knew of, past or present. These schooled children be came citizens, he said, with a thin ‘mass character,’ holding excellence and aesthetics equally in contempt, inadequate to the personal crises of their lives.” [p. 77-78]

“By allowing the imposition of direction from centers far beyond our control, we have time and again missed the lesson of the congregational principle: that people are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, famly, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others. And these dreams must be written locally because to exercise any larger ambition without such a base is to lose touch with the things which give life meaning: self, family, friends, work, and intimate community.” [p. 96]

there is no “one right way” in education and human affairs in general: “…the changing dynamics of time and situatioin and locality render expertise irrelevant and obsolete shortly after it is annointed.” [p. 100]

“…[Monopoly schooling] draws it gratest power from being a natural adjuct to the kind of commercial economy we have that requires permanently dissatisfied consumers.” [p. 101]

from the biographical note:

“genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.” contrary to “training in two elite universities” that “taught me that intelligence and talent distrubuted themselves economically over a bell curve…” [p. xi]

“…I began to devise guerilla exercises to allow the kids I taught…the raw material to teach themselves…I tried 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.” [p. xii]

“…I dropped the idea that i was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.” [p. xiii]

“People have to be allowed to make their own mistakes and try again, or they will never master themselves, although they may well seem to be competent when they have in fact only memorized or imitated someone else’s performance.” [p. xiv]

vocabulary:
dialectic:
1 : LOGIC
2 a : discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation; specifically : the Socratic techniques of exposing false beliefs and eliciting truth

dissonance:
1 a : lack of agreement; especially : inconsistency between the beliefs one holds or between one’s actions and one’s beliefs
2 : a mingling of discordant sounds; especially : a clashing or unresolved musical interval or chord