We keep getting letters explaining that of course the government schools can\u2019t be expected to turn out as good a product as the private schools — even private schools that spend less per student per year — since the private schools get to pick and choose their students, while the government youth propaganda camps have to \u201ctake every which one.\u201d <\/p>\n
In a speech he gave after being named New York City\u2019s Teacher of the Year (yes, \u201cpublic school\u201d) in 1989, John Taylor Gatto famously said: <\/p>\n
\u201cOur form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts, from around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated 80 percent of the Massachusetts population, with the last outpost, in Barnstable on Cape Cod, not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by the militia and the children marched to school under guard. … <\/p>\n
\u201cSenator Ted Kennedy\u2019s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98 percent, and after it the figure never again climbed above 91 percent, where it stands in 1990. … <\/p>\n
\u201cHere is another curiosity to think about: The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where 1.5 million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five, or even 10 years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime,\u201d Mr. Gatto continued, \u201cbut if we\u2019re going to change what\u2019s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution \u2018schools\u2019 very well, but it does not \u2018educate\u2019; that\u2019s inherent in the design of the thing. It\u2019s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It\u2019s just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing. <\/p>\n
\u201cSchools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and other to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. <\/p>\n
\u201cTo a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic — because the community life that protects the dependent and weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I\u2019ve said, 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. … <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your youth, in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its \u2018homework.\u2019 <\/p>\n
\u201c \u2018How will they learn to read?\u2019 you say, and my answer is: \u2018Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.\u2019 When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the life that unfolds around them. …\u201d <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot more. You can find it easily Online. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m just trying to imagine the men with the bayonets explaining to the residents of Barnstable, back in 1880, \u201cSee, when Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United Stated in 1831, he reported our American working class were more literate, better read, more up-to-date on the affairs of the day than those of any European nation. But what we\u2019re here to do is to force you to give up the voluntary, community-based schools that accomplished that, and instead let us herd your kids into tax-supported, coercion based, collectivist government schools on the Prussian model, because a bunch of mushy headed Ph.D\u2019s think it will be a great experiment in government control of the masses. <\/p>\n
\u201cJust think of it! Within 130 years you\u2019ll be forced to spend more than $6,000 per child,\u201d (The Washington Post reported on April 6, 2008 that if we include its total operating budget, teacher retirement, capital budget and federal funding, the D.C. public schools now spend $24,600 per year per student) \u201cand after 12 years of schooling, this town\u2019s high school graduates in 2010 won\u2019t be able to reliably spell simple words, count change, or structure a proper English sentence, which are all things your fifth graders can do today! We wish we could promise you better results, but you see, the six-figure bureaucrats running our new tax-funded youth propaganda camps \u2018will have to accept every which one.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n
What a deal! <\/p>\n
The premise was that government could do the job better, if they could just wrest those kids away from the bad influence of their parents. Yet now they explain that of course they\u2019re failing, because \u201cThe parents aren\u2019t doing their part\u201d! This is like the Khmer Rouge saying their revolution couldn\u2019t succeed until they killed every Cambodian who knew how to read, and then whining that of course things aren\u2019t working out: those darned educated elites refuse to do their part! <\/p>\n
People keep writing in to demand that I explain my plan to reform the government schools. Do you also want my plan to turn your excrement back into the delicious meal you ate yesterday? Education \u201creform\u201d can only get underway when the last government-run, coercion-based school is closed for good, and the last educrat has been told he can\u2019t have any more tax money to fund his latest \u201creform.\u201d <\/p>\n
The current paradigm, endlessly brayed, is that we \u201chave a collective responsibility to pay taxes to fund the (virtually worthless) schooling of other people\u2019s kids, because they\u2019re our future.\u201d <\/p>\n
In fact, we all know the Pilgrims were starving, back in 1622, because the deadbeats stole the food out of their collective garden plots when it was barely ripe, giving the real workers no incentive to continue working. <\/p>\n
Prosperity only came when the governor authorized private gardens, with each family allowed to eat what they grew, and those who didn\u2019t work condemned to starve. <\/p>\n
Once they did this, no one starved. They voluntarily worked. <\/p>\n
Since the \u201ccollective obligation\u201d paradigm has failed so utterly in modern American schooling, as well, let me propose a new one: We have no obligation to educate anyone\u2019s offspring but our own. In fact, while we are of course free to indulge our instinct to charity by offering to VOLUNTARILY help fund the schooling of orphans and such, the nation will again thrive only when we realize this is a competition. I have a vested interest in seeing my own children receive an education, so they will prosper. Meantime, I hope all you deadbeats out there DON\u2019T do a thing to educate your kids, because that will reduce the competition for my kids. <\/p>\n
Mine will grow rich, and yours will have to do our menial labor in hopes my kids will toss you a few scraps. <\/p>\n
This is not an hereditary elite, but an equal opportunity meritocracy. Learn now or starve later. <\/p>\n
Collectivists have been trying to forcibly alter this equation for centuries. Not only do they always fail; they often end up swinging from lamp posts. <\/p>\n
The argument will be offered that the pathetic unmarried welfare mom — probably quasi-literate, herself — will have no ability to fund her own kids\u2019 educations, even if we allow her to keep the money she\u2019s now spending in sales and property taxes (yes, renters pay property tax, even if it\u2019s not itemized) since the father is a long-absent crackhead. <\/p>\n
But this presupposes that minority women must always bear children to deadbeat absentee crackheads, as an unalterable fact of nature. <\/p>\n
In fact, put young women in a position to say \u201cWait a minute, you mean to tell me once I bear a child there\u2019s going to be no government agency to provide me with Food Stamps, housing subsidies, and a basically worthless free tax-funded \u2018education\u2019 — that this kid will be worthless to help support me in my old age unless *I* pay for his schooling?\u201d and you might notice something very refreshing happening. <\/p>\n
You might notice those young women saying, \u201cWell then, I can\u2019t afford to bear a child by this shiftless drug gangster. Yo, crackhead, you\u2019re out of here TODAY. Now, I wonder if that young man who was so nice to me at church might still be interested. He\u2019s a little boring, but he might be the kind who\u2019d actually land a job and stick around and help me raise my kids.\u201d <\/p>\n
It used to work that way. Why couldn\u2019t it work that way again? Because racial minority women, unlike Anglo women, are incapable of figuring this out, once you remove the perverse government incentives for their current behaviors? <\/p>\n
What are you, a racist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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