Can we get more citations for this besides Gatto?
I.e., do we have citations to some of Dewey's works, or the early 1900s academic reformers advocating this?
I.e., do we have citations to some of Dewey's works, or the early 1900s academic reformers advocating this?
A proper education comes when you put pupils in a room with a very smart person and let them question him. He answers their questions and introduces them to new ideas. Pupils guide the learning, tutors are just a resource. There are no lesson plans.
This is how the great thinkers have learned and taught since the dawn of man. This is how the wealthy and in-the-know still educate themselves.
When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education. They invented "public education" and modeled it after church education where students are preached to and rigidly controlled.
Church is a place where poor people go to be controlled. Public school extended this control programming to the formative years of all the children of the non-elite. Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity.
Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good. All the great thinkers, today and in the past, learned by directing themselves and (ideally) questioning smart people. Never by being whipped into doing lesson plans, always by following their creativity and doing investigations and self-directed projects.
Also, German schooling was famously rigid, and produced a sizable crop of scientists in the 1900-1960 era.
Universities in 1900 are indistinguishable from what we have now. In 1900 they were still targeted at the wealthy and unusually talented. Now they are just extended sunday school. Obedience training for adults.
You are saying these things with massive assumptions!
edit for clarification: you are not using any sort of proof mechanism in your statements. No data, no citations.
I imagine you doing the rounds at dinner parties raising your finger shouting "Citation needed!" over and over again.
Google: gatto, liberal education, conformity, obedience. My argument is a point of view, not a research study.
Gatto cites Dewey, for the record.
If your point of view has no data behind it that you are willing to reference besides a singular biased point of information, then I have no reason to believe you. (Hint, if you are read in an area, it's trivial to reference such things off the top of your head).
I'm presenting my synthesized point of view based on a lifetime of contemplation. You're trying to cut it down on the merit of one or two citations.
Read the wikipedia article on "liberal education" and compare it to your experiences at public school. That is my citation.
So, how about citing some of them?
I am crying out for data, because only by the truth represented by data can we make informed decisions. All else is blowing in the wind, gibbering tones of madness based on personal biases and opinions.
further edit:
I specifically asked for citations to demonstrate the validity of this claim:
Nobody wants to admit that the concept of "school" itself was designed to church out assembly line slaves. It's not a surprise that when the system is designed to turn humans into robots... that's what you get. Anyone who comes out of school with useful skills does it despite school, not because of school. John Taylor Gatto figured this out years ago.
In particular, this is an assertion of design, ie, that it was designed. I am saying, "Let's have more information", that is, references to thinkers who have advocated the effect of your quote.
Specifically, I am requesting a demonstration, a proof of these (relatively controversial) claims besides mentioning Gatto. You have refused to provide these so far.
This is not a personal opinion position paper I am poking holes in. I am poking at the need for demonstratable truth to your claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_European_research_un...
Rather a lot of the scientists and engineers on the Apollo program grew up in tiny backwater schools funded by local subscription. Their teachers were high school graduates or (if lucky) graduates of a two year normal college. The "educated upper class" consisted of the local town fathers who thought that the average teenager was capable of a lot more than the amusements they would have otherwise picked for themselves. It turns out the town fathers were right.
> Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity.
Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of learning the classics of high culture in what you are claiming are industrial indoctrination factories.
> Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good.
Calculus, computer science, electromagnetism, chemistry, writing, poetry, etc. 16-year-old me was not yet organized and knowledgeable enough to know where to even begin.