With ‘reform’ dead, why do we need the DOE?

Mark Aug. 8 on your calendar. Few realize it, but the events of Aug. 5 through 8 marked the beginning of massive changes in America.

No, I don’t write today about the overdue Standard & Poor downgrade of the actuarially bankrupt federal government’s bond rating, or even the (possibly more important) whining, petulant, vapid reaction of Barack Obama, an affirmative action baby confronting for the first time the undeniable failure of the memorized socialist “blame the rich” claptrap that served him so well in his first two careers, as professional affirmative action student and professional motivational speaker for rabble-rousing leftist outfits on the taxpayer dole.

No, look at that OTHER story on the front page of your Aug. 9 newspaper. Faced with widespread whimpering from administrators of the fraudulent, coercion-based jobs factories known as the government schools, that the “No Child Left Behind” act just makes it too hard for them to look good because it has actually required testing the academic achievement of their charges and then making the abysmal results public, Mr. Obama’s Secretary of Teacher Full-Employment, Arne Duncan, announced Aug. 8 that the testing requirements are serving as an “impediment” and “disincentive” for government educrats, and therefore he’s going to encourage some of the states that are having trouble meeting the testing requirements to apply for testing exemptions, come September.

How many states?

Um … fifty.

Which must eventually lead even slow-witted parents and taxpayers to ask, “If testing the kids to find out if they can read, write and do simple sums after we’ve spent 10 or 20 grand per year on each of them is an “impediment” to what the educrats “are supposed to be doing,” what on earth are they actually supposed to be doing? And if what they’re up to has nothing to do with producing high school graduates who can pass a multiple-choice test that the eighth graders of 1955 could have passed with their eyes closed, why should we keep funding the federal DOE , our state DOEs, or even our fraud-peddling local school districts?”

Let us, for starters, hear no more talk of “reform.” How do you set about “reforming” a massive institution that’s doing precisely what it was designed to do — dumbing down a once-free people into docile dimwits, desperately see-sawing back and forth from the Scylla of the Stalinist Republicrats to the Charybdis of the Fascist-Lite Demopublicans (both back the TSA: Ask to see their search warrants), voting back into power first with the left hand and then with the right the same ruling class of banksters, hucksters, thugs and bunko artists who have been busily enriching themselves — and bankrupting us — for almost a century?

If “The Theory of Money & Credit” (http://tinyurl.com/3ky2vg4) sounds like too thick a wade, read Rose Wilder Lane’s “The Discovery of Freedom / Man’s Struggle Against Authority,” by the daughter who helped ready her mom’s “Little House” books for publication. Copies are available from five bucks at Amazon (or find a nice one at http://tinyurl.com/43elhe4.)

Imagine, in this joyful clarion call to freedom, Ms. Lane was explaining, way back in 1943: “Forty years ago, American children went to school because they wanted to go, or because their parents sent them. Children knew the fact that schooling is a great opportunity which the Revolution had opened here to all children alike.”

But “The American method of education was never fully developed; it was stopped about forty years ago by the eager German-minded reformers, who believed that the State can spend an American’s money for his, or his children’s education, much more wisely than he can. American schooling is now compulsory, enforced by the police and controlled by the State (that is, by the politicians in office) and paid for by compulsory taxes.

“The inevitable result is to postpone a child’s growing-up,” Ms. Lane writes. “His actual situation does not require him to develop self-reliance, self-discipline and responsibility; that is, he has no actual experience of freedom in his youth. This is ideal education for the German State, whose subjects are not expected ever to know freedom. … But it does not work that way in this country. …”

Trying — and failing — to disguise the underlying compulsion of their undertaking, “The teachers try to make learning easy, a game. But real learning is not easy; it requires self-discipline and hard work. The attempt to make learning effortless actually keeps a child from discovering the pleasure of self-discipline and of the mental effort that overcomes difficulties. … It is not the best preparation for inheriting the leadership of the World Revolution for freedom.”

There’s no room here to detail how Horace Mann and John Dewey and their gang imported Prussian schooling methods and assumptions, wholesale, to this country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in their vast and often successful plot to destroy intelligence and individualism amongst America’s underclass. If you want to understand that, read John Taylor Gatto’s “Dumbing Us Down” or his “Underground History of American Education.”

In “Underground History,” Mr. Gatto, who was chosen (government-school) Teacher of the Year for both New York City and New York state, and thus can’t be accused of being some “sour grapes outsider who’s embittered because he could never make it in The System,” points out:

“You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. … “Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher? …”

Gatto traces the scheme back to the 19th century.

“During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. ….”

Why were the school designed to dumb down a nation?

“The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you,” Mr. Gatto replies. “Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.

“Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. … Hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. …”

If you want to be free, restore exuberant, exciting education in America. How? Refuse to patronize or support in any way the government-run schools.

Next week: Confirming Secretary Duncan’s assertion that testing kids on reading and math is merely an “impediment” and “disincentive” to what our educrats are really up to, Mr. Gatto details for us what the government schools really DO teach.

7 Comments to “With ‘reform’ dead, why do we need the DOE?”

  1. Caleb Says:

    “Refuse to patronize or support in any way the government-run schools.”
    I wish I knew how to follow this advice. I don’t have any crotch-spawn of my own, so don’t try to convince me of the value of “free schools”.
    I don’t know nearly as much as I should about this type of thing, but I suspect that my property taxes pay for the indoctrination of other people’s children, and I don’t know how to get out of paying property taxes (without losing my home).

    In an attempt to find out how to refrain from paying the portion of my taxes that are spent on indoctrination of other people’s minor children, I found this explanation of how my money is spent.
    It seems that my money is spent to “pay bills and salaries, or maintain and create services”.

    Wow! Really?! “…Create Services”? You take my money so that you can think up new ways to spend it?!!! That must be a difficult job.

    How long to I have to wait before a gym membership is the “right of every American”?

    -Caleb

  2. Jerry A. Pipes Says:

    Can’t wait for next week’s installment!

  3. Harry Gilcrest Says:

    Sir:
    Your information has supplied us with the confidence to home-school our 8 year-old. He attended a private academy from Kindergarten (a German word and a clue that you are dead-on right) thru second grade. Unfortunately, that school was, with minor differences, run like the public school. How many private schools have their rosters stuffed with former public school staff? Thanks also for pointing us toward JT Gatto,
    We had many good reasons to move here a dozen years ago, but the true surprise was diving into the op-ed pages of the RJ and discovering intellectual firepower wide and deep. Your writing especially prepared us for this moment -the decision to educate our own. We owe you one…
    HRG

  4. Chris Says:

    Harry, I just wanted to say congratulations. We started homeschooling our kids two years ago. I really think the superior education and guidance we can provide these kids will be critical to our country’s future. Perhaps (hopefully), we are planting the seeds for an era of liberty.

  5. Vin Suprynowicz Says:

    A gratifying response from HRG. Trust your instincts.

    Yes, the extent to which many private schools today mirror the structure and form of the government schools — which is the heart of the problem — is probably worth a further look.

    Do they do this to win “accreditation” — or can they just not imagine any other model? Or would many parents refuse to pay for anything less structured?

    I remember (modern) homeschool pioneer Micki Colfax writing about Time magazine coming out to do a feature on the phenomenon after they managed to win admission for four home-schooled kids — one of them adopted — to top-notch Ivy League schools. (Or did they all go to Harvard?) She was at first confused by what the photographer was doing as he instructed her to line up some chairs in the kitchen facing a blackboard or bulletin board. Finally she “got it” and put her foot down, refusing to cooperate with creating a totally fake “home classroom” to fit the photographer’s preconceived ideas of what “home-schooling” OUGHT to look like.

    Descriptions of the “schooling” of the Founding Fathers can sound quite cryptic to modern readers. After learning at an early age to read English, French and Latin — the early biographers don’t make this sound particularly hard, unique, or time-consuming — the young men were often invited to visit a neighboring home or plantation which housed an impressive library, where they “read” for a few years.

    What? That’s it?

    Presumably the owner of the library engaged them in some discussion of what they were reading, in order to recommend what they might want to read next. But yes, that seems to have been “it.” Those who wanted to take a law degree were often in law school at age 16 or 17. The total absence of today’s presumption that people are only “ready” for a certain level of learning by age 13, or 19, or 23 — that everything has to be strettttched out over 16 or 18 years — is striking. You keep flipping back the page to see if you missed an account of the young lad struggling manfully through year after year of tedious repetition, hazing by the older boys, preparing “reports” by cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them together, building cleaning-product “volcanoes” out of papier mache, teacher decorating the classroom for St. Patricks’s Day with green shmarockls …

    Nope.

    I’m also deeply puzzled that America — the heart of capitalism — does such a MISERABLE job of talking to kids EARLY about “buying and selling” — allocating small sums to buy and care for not just “disposables,” but things that might appreciate in value, starting with a few silver coins, first edition books by a favorite author, etc. You don’t have to have thousands of dollars to attend a few flea markets and yard sales, learning about “buying low and selling high.” Why do we assume “commerce” and “money” are such naughty and impenetrable subjects that they can’t even be INTRODUCED until graduate school, at which point there’s an enormous amount of “un-teaching” to be done?

    Imagine a public school teacher saying, “For our Fifth Grade field trip, we’re going to go carefully spend $10 each at a thrift shop, pawn shop, or flea market — not on breakable plastic toys, but on old copper and silver coins, nice old books, bolts of cloth, things with values that can be tracked” and then spend the next six months occasionally going back & tracking online the current prices of silver and copper, etc.

    Why is that so unthinkable? Don’t we assume these kids will eventually have to find a job with a “business”? Don’t we think they might have a leg up if they’re the only applicant to knowledgeably ask that employer “What’s your margin? What’s your markup? What kind of volume do we have to do here each day to make our nut?”

    The mis-fit between schooling and the real world is actually quite amazing.

    — V.S.

  6. Heather Sears Says:

    Although I agree with some of what you said, you can’t fully appreciate what the average teacher goes through until you’ve experienced it yourself. Your comments concerning the NCLB Act and how we are whining and fearful of testing our students because we haven’t taught them anything just doesn’t jive with what really happens in a classroom. Research the law and you will see that many of its requirements are just not humanly possible. One hundred percent of students to be on grade level by 2012? Really? When most of our students (at least at my school) are second-language students who may or may not have attended school in their native country and therefore, were never on grade level to begin with? Whose parents, if they have parents, work two jobs each and are never home to help with homework? Check out Tuesday’s article “Hispanics now largest student group in state” for some real insight into where some of the problems lie, or better yet, watch the Youtube clip “Teacher talks to principal”. This clip hits the nail right on the head. This is our reality. This is what we go through each and every day. I agree with you that real learning requires hard work and self-discipline and that is what I teach my class from day one. Unfortunately, if that’s not what they’re taught at home as well, it doesn’t always stick. And that’s just the beginning. I have students who do try their very hardest, some of whom are new to the country and may have actually progressed as much as two grade levels in one school year, but the state still says, “they didn’t pass the CRT test with a score of 310 or better. That’s just not fair to those kids who want to learn. That’s why Tuesday’s acticle was encouraging. Changing the way individual students’ progress is tracked will give a more accurate picture of their learning.

    Trust me, I know how lucky I am to even have a job and I personally love my school, my peers, and my administration. That doesn’t change the fact however, that it’s getting harder and harder to do this job because of all these factors. I just wanted to teach. My goal is not to “dumb down” the learning for my students, nor is it to “teach to the test”. Unfortunately, and I agree with you on this, that is what is happening. We are drowning in red tape and interventions and wearing ten different hats to boot. Come shadow me or another teacher 24/7 for a month or so if you want reality. I was a casino dealer for 24 years before becoming a teacher. I thought that dealing with kids could not be any tougher than putting up with drunk adults were are losing their life savings and blowing smoke in my face for hours while I tried to “entertain” them. Wrong. At least when I walked out the door at the end of my shift I didn’t have to take the job home with me. Now I take anti-anxiety pills so I don’t stay awake all night worrying about the kids who are falling behind or failing, or don’t know where their next meal will come from. We mistakenly had high hopes when Obama said during his campaign that “parents have to get on board and be a part of their child’s education”. The reality is that that is never going to happen across the board. Unfortunately, that’s what we need the most. That said, I must say that I feel bad for young people who go into teaching today. Had I known what I was getting into, I would have made a different choice. Maybe you are right to say we should abolish the educational system and let the parents choose to home school their own children, or not. I would gladly go elsewhere if that is what it takes to get rid of the broken system we have today. It’s just not what I signed up for.

  7. Clark Says:

    Only fifty states will be allowed to opt out? What about the other seven? Sounds like Arne has some explaining to do to his boss!