School is Out!

The demise of public education combined with unprecedented hyper-consumerism, perverted social behaviour and rapid moral digression, should be the cause of extreme concern and force us (as parents) to re-examine--among other things--our educational alternatives to Compulsory Education.

John Taylor Gatto in his interview, Dumbing Us Down, states:

The primary objective (of a compulsory education) is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people(the religious purpose), to make good citizens(the public purpose)and to make individuals their personal best(the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia (history of the Prussian educational system) in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.

Mass-Education has conceded that intellectual stimulation is no longer the stated goal, but rather a luxury offered to the social elite in preparation for their future "shepherding the flocks" within the "green" pastures of our--rapidly expanding ever shrinking--global village.

Educational faddists relentlessly bludgeon us with their newly acquired instructional techniques and constantly remind us that; "Education can only be provided by professional educators"; and any alternative route will never lead one to the "Educational Promised Land".

Shattering this myth; of the blissful educational utopia; is John Taylor Gatto's critical essay, Against School, where he writes:

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi volume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

But for those who choose not to offer their young on the sacrificial alter of "Compulsory Education" and refuse to prescribe to the mantra of: "Old lamps for New", an age-old wisdom soothingly reminds them, "that things are not always what they seem".

Jessie Wise one of the co-authors of, The Well-Trained Mind, writes:

"All my teacher education had brainwashed me. I was convinced that parents couldn't possibly teach their own children-certainly not at home. It had to be done in an institution setting, run by professionals, with their resources and specialized training and expertise".

An unfortunate blameworthy mannerism we have collectively mastered, is our ability to present scathing social critiques without offering practical alternatives.

To avoid being guilty of my own claim, it is my opinion that a return to the time-proven success of a Classical Education is the only remedy to restore our health from the current intellectual paralysis that has afflicted us, resulting from prolonged exposure to Compulsory Education. That being said, in my next post (God willing) I would like to define and introduce a Classical Education and the role it can play in guiding this rudderless ship back to port.