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The Underground History of American Education

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Antigen:
Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!

Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.

Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I?ve seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I?d admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That?s why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn?t your own little Janey or mine.

Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It?s called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.


http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm


They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. ... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit.
--Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer
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_________________
Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
Drug war POW
Seed `71 - `80
Straight, Sarasota
   10/80 - 10/82
Anonymity Anonymous
return undef() if /coercion/i;

`:
cool, i have heard that author is good. i think i became immune to them trying to put me in my place, so they had to send me to Straight.

Antigen:
I think that happens a LOT
Black markets will always be with us. But they will recede in importance when our public morality is consistent with our private one.


Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness
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Antigen:
In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that the Program is a natural and necessary adjunct to the public indoctrination scheme.


--- Quote ---The principal motivation for this revolution in family and community life might seem to be greed, but this surface appearance conceals philosophical visions approaching religious exaltation in intensity?that effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions and historic American libertarian attitudes.

Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a "human resource" and managed as a "workforce." No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled.


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In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong

--John Kenneth Galbraith
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Antigen:

--- Quote ---Gatto
In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

--- Quote ---Wilson
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.


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What is this new loyalty? It is, above all, conformity. It is the uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is. It rejects inquiry into the race question or socialized medicine or public housing, regards as heinous any challenge to what is called the system of private enterprise, identifying that system with Americanism. It abandons evolution, repudiates the once popular concept of progress, and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete. The concept of loyalty as conformity is a false one. It is narrow and restrictive, denies freedom of thought and conscience... What do men know of loyalty who make a mockery of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?
Henry Steele Commager, 1947
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