General Interest > Feed Your Head
The Underground History of American Education
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in case anyone missed the link:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
:eek: !
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Ginger, i was just wondering if this stuff starts way early, like all the parenting books, and the cultural lore telling people how to deal with children from birth -- put them in the crib and let them cry. they have to learn, that sort of thing. but there are cultures that are completely different. the infants live all day in a sling and nurse whenever, without all the time rules parents are taught in this culture. at night they sleep with their mother. when they get bigger other people take turns carrying the baby, including children. the explanation i have heard is that in those cultures, children are being raised to be a part of an extended and interdependent family. whereas, in our culture, children are being raised to be independent.
well now i would have my disagreements about the last bit there, i think. our options for survival, and the education Gatto is talking about are actually producing very dependent people.
i haven't gotten that far in the book yet, but i think he mentions that a little, that Americans had an independent way and then some completely different ideology got hold in the schools...
but think about that baby crying in the crib, who told his mom and dad to ignore that? where did that come from? and does it help to create a human who can then put up with a whole lot more inhumane treatment through its life?
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I'm putting Deborah's post up here. I think it fits well if we are talking about the effects of cultural ideology...
--- Quote ---On 2005-06-05 20:42:00, Deborah wrote:
"*** It's funny how when this shit happens to arab people who aren't even US citizens the world unites against the US govt. When we do it to our own kids, no one blinks an eye. Says a lot about the society our parents have created. Time to change!
I think this article speaks to that issue, as well as the Teen Warehouse Industry.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/content/view/73/106/
Comfortably Numb
Did you feel for those Iraqis who were tied down and had attack dogs baying and chewing at them? Did seeing the pictures and hearing the stories make you sick? Or were you like most of us ? engaged by the drama, entertained by the scandal, yet comfortably numb about the whole thing?
Many have replaced empathy with an ?I?-centered
sentimentality. Feeling has been turned on its head: caring is now a means not for taking action, but for feeling better about oneself or getting attention. We ride the emotional dramas in the tabloids, wear colored ribbons, and express our love for God and country. Meanwhile, we take no action ? at least none driven by empathy.
Empathy is how we respond to the plight of fellow
human beings. It is the bedrock of our moral
sensibility that allows us to feel for others, to put ourselves in their place. If you cannot feel, how can you act outside your own wants and desires? To many today, it seems easier to just deny feelings of empathy, to react to them ?rationally? as a weakness in this hard and fast world.
But this has a cost. Losing feeling for others, or
never developing the capacity to feel deeply at all, means closing off a fundamental part of being human. We feel less not just about the millions of innocent people killed by violence in the past decade, or the thousands of civilians killed in America?s wars for peace, but also about, say, our own partner, neighbors or parents. All feelings run along the same neural
pathways.
Shutting down some means shutting down many. In the process, we become less human. As this happens, we not only stop feeling the pain of others, we become more capable of inflicting it. This is the darkest side of empathy?s erosion. If feelings underlie an empathic response, numbness makes brutality viable. Thus, as you happily switch off from humanity, you become a threat to it. We were comfortably numb about the torture at Abu Ghraib, and so were the GI guards who carried it out. Americans didn?t say sorry because they didn?t feel sorry. Simple as that.
And if we can?t feel for others, who will feel for us?
Perhaps this is part of the general worsening of
mental well-being. As a recent World Health
Organization study shows, there?s a near-perfect
correlation between the rise of alienation in the
modern world and the decline of people?s mental
states, with mental dysfunction growing globally. As empathy falls, behaviors predicated on its lack have been pathologized, like narcissistic and antisocial personalities. But these are not symptoms of organic disease. Instead, it is the social system that is in need of radical treatment.
Consider the example of antidepressant drugs like
Paxil and Zoloft. It is now understood that these ssri antidepressants shut down peoples? sexual emotions. What remains less appreciated is that they produce their mood-altering effect by essentially manufacturing apathy. Are these drugs popular, in part, precisely because they shut down our feelings? It is a frightening notion. Medicating our numbness is one thing, with a long and lonely history. But a culture medicating itself into comfortable numbness is something else. It is no longer the symptom but the cure.
Richard DeGrandpre
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--- End quote ---
Antigen:
--- Quote ---On 2005-06-06 06:02:00, :wink: wrote:
the explanation i have heard is that in those cultures, children are being raised to be a part of an extended and interdependent family. whereas, in our culture, children are being raised to be independent.
well now i would have my disagreements about the last bit there, i think. our options for survival, and the education Gatto is talking about are actually producing very dependent people.
--- End quote ---
Right, but dependent on whom? The way we used to do it, ppl were dependent on and faithful to their own families and communities. Now we're dependent on some anonymous professional authority somewhere to tell us what to do and how to do it. And we're faithful to no one and nothing.
Vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts, unutterably vain, worthless as wither'd weeds.
--Emily Bronte
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Anonymous:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EduTalk/
EduTalk Education Discussion Group began reading John Taylor Gatto's book, "The Underground History of American Education," on June 1st. It's not too late to join in.
The discussion thus far has been pretty stimulating.
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