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Weapons of Mass Instruction

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We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness — curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight — simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. — location: 194 ^ref-44941

compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical intervention into the prospective unity of these underclasses. — location: 250 ^ref-17708

Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. — location: 253 ^ref-18975

it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. — location: 282 ^ref-36739

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” — location: 285 ^ref-35707

Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. — location: 305 ^ref-24460

We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. — location: 308 ^ref-25200

School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. — location: 315 ^ref-44970

Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. — location: 317 ^ref-36078

genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. — location: 326 ^ref-52923

In simple language, on the most basic level of institutional management, smart kids had to be kept from stupid ones; — location: 362 ^ref-27045

school became an open battleground between old-fashioned, modest, reading, writing and arithmetic ambitions of historic schooling, and proponents of advanced academic thinking, located mainly in project offices of great corporate non-profit foundations like Carnegie and Rockefeller — men who worked diligently to lead institutional schooling toward a scientific rationalization of all social affairs. — location: 368 ^ref-46927

You can detect Bloom at work in any initiative which seeks to classify students for the convenience of social managers and businesses. — location: 393 ^ref-34849

In this laissez-faire fashion a system of “modern” schooling was constructed without any public participation, or even much public knowledge. — location: 442 ^ref-24193

The task we set before ourselves is very simple. . .we will organize children. . . and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. — location: 450 ^ref-28412

In a few short years from WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared, seemingly from nowhere. — location: 462 ^ref-2534

Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and 1960s, far more intensely schooled than either of the two earlier groups, but now the four percent illiteracy of 1941, transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy rate of 1952, was now 27 percent. — location: 468 ^ref-24797

during WWII, American public schools — first in urban areas, then everywhere — were converted from phonetic ways of instruction (the ancient “alphabet system”) to non-phonetic methods which involved memorizing whole word units, and lots of guessing for unfamiliar words. — location: 489 ^ref-16256

What Hegel taught that intrigued the powerful then and now was that history could be deliberately managed by skillfully provoking crises out of public view and then demanding national unity to meet those crises — a disciplined unity under cover of which leadership privileges approached the absolute. — location: 516 ^ref-57170

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. . . . The great purpose of school [self-alienation] can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. . . . It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world. — location: 526 ^ref-28052

When you flip hamburgers, sit at a computer all day, unpack and shelve merchandise from China year after year, you manage the tedium better if you have a shallow inner life, one you can escape through booze, drugs, sex, media, or other low level addictive behaviors. Easier to keep sane if your inner life is shallow. School, thought Harris the great American schoolman, should prepare ordinary men and women for lifetimes of alienation. Can you say he wasn’t fully rational? — location: 537 ^ref-3868

In every age, men of wealth and power have approached education for ordinary people with suspicion because it is certain to stimulate discontent, certain to awaken desires impossible to gratify. — location: 553 ^ref-15751

“the problem of educational schooling.” According to the Bureau, by inculcating accurate knowledge workers would “perceive and calculate their grievances,” making them “redoubtable foes” in labor struggles! Best not have that. — location: 555 ^ref-41515

“We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.” — location: 558 ^ref-36568

Andrew Carnegie, writing 126 years after Smith, in The Empire of Business disagreed. Educational schooling, said Carnegie, gave working people bad attitudes, it taught what was useless, it imbued the future workforce with “false ideas” that gave it “a distaste for practical life.” — location: 562 ^ref-61794

the reality of mass production which could not be constrained to simply meet human demands, but instead imposed the demands of production on human wishes. Where once the conventional laws of supply and demand put the buyer in the driver’s seat, in the topsy-turvy world of financial capitalism demand had to be created for whatever could be supplied most profitably at the moment. — location: 567 ^ref-51867

The new forced schooling octopus taught anyone unable to escape its tentacles that inert knowledge — memorizing the dots — is the gold standard of intellectual achievement. Not connecting those dots. It set out to create a reflexive obedience to official directions as opposed to accepting responsibility for one’s own learning. — location: 574 ^ref-35207

among those labeled “gifted” and “talented,” the standard is more sophisticated: there children are required to memorize both dots as well as what experts say is the correct way to connect those dots into narratives: even to memorize several conflicting expert analyses in a simulation of genuine critical thinking. — location: 578 ^ref-51260

We were embarked on a unique libertarian path right up to the Civil War, until post-war fallout put an end to its career in reality, although the original myths are still with us. — location: 590 ^ref-21384

By arranging for larger and larger bureaucratic units, only those with funds enough and reputation to campaign at large beyond the neighborhood could be elected. — location: 623 ^ref-4609

With local watchdogs gone, tendencies to use mass schooling as a cash cow were exploited by every special interest group with political friends. — location: 625 ^ref-63447

Any political management, even tyranny, must provide enough work for ordinary people that revolutionary conditions don’t emerge. Forced schooling provides a spectacular jobs project, one almost infinitely elastic, one expanding and contracting with employment needs. It should be no secret to you that institutional schooling, with all its outriggers, is the principal employer in the United States. — location: 664 ^ref-11794

forced schooling represented a big step backwards from the exciting free market in learning offered by the bazaar of American life, a market well-illustrated in the lives of Franklin, Jefferson, Farragut, and many others. — location: 673 ^ref-6231

the goals of good moral values, good citizenship skills, and good personal development were exchanged for a novel fourth purpose — becoming a human resource to be spent by businessmen and politicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, school was looked at by insiders as a branch of industry. — location: 678 ^ref-10188

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. — location: 683 ^ref-23469

the chief end of the project was “to impose on the young the ideal of subordination.” — location: 689 ^ref-42322

to produce at all in a mass production sense requires huge amounts of money to be assembled from investors for the purchase of production machinery, and for its repair and upgrading, training programs, advertising, a distribution infrastructure, and so on. Unless protection against overproduction is promised investors, why would anyone risk capital to produce in the first place? — location: 702 ^ref-17151

The common population was still insufficiently conditioned to be interdependent and specialized. — location: 708 ^ref-39929

the incredible inventiveness of the American people, a natural by-product of three factors: an open-source learning tradition; a heterogeneous, mixed-age society which didn’t exclude the young from full participation; and a government presence without heavy-handedness. — location: 710 ^ref-55179

rationalized pedagogy was a natural vehicle to implant habits and attitudes to accomplish that end. Under this outlook, the classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others. The ultimate goal implanted in student minds, which replaced the earlier goal of independent livelihoods, was getting a good job. — location: 716 ^ref-26940

Classical business values corrupt education, they have no place in education except as cultural artifacts to be examined. — location: 721 ^ref-50799

when the young were assigned to consume, not produce; when they were ordered to be passive, not active, as part of the general society, the schools we have were the inevitable result of this transformation. — location: 723 ^ref-60373

free-form “education,” the variety I call “open-source” education, is of much higher quality than rule-driven, one-size-fits-all, “testable” schooling — location: 742 ^ref-29248

You either write your own script, or you become an actor in somebody else’s script. — location: 810 ^ref-12401

you and I need to re-examine everything we’ve been conditioned to accept as truth. Everything. That’s called dialectical thinking. Once dialectics was central to school, but we don’t teach it anymore. Not even to the so-called “gifted and talented.” — location: 828 ^ref-59459

Glen explained how easy it was to teach a baby to read, count, and do basic arithmetical functions. — location: 844 ^ref-2232

“They learn instantly,” he said, “the trouble comes if you wait until they’re five, or if you spend too much time in review. Every year you delay increases the magnitude of difficulty.” — location: 845 ^ref-32776

Foreign visitors like Tocqueville and DuPont de Nemours were constantly being dazzled by the high energy released in a society reaching for revolutionary egalitarianism, one which mixed all ages together, took risks, and discarded the rigid categories of European tradition. — location: 954 ^ref-6113

the contest between family and nature as centers of meaning (versus profit achieved by converting human beings into human resources) becomes clear. — location: 959 ^ref-3571

this radical transformation from local democracy to de facto oligarchy, people with minds of their own became an impediment to efficient management. Think of it this way: lives assigned to routine work are best kept childish. — location: 969 ^ref-7523

Childish people are not only obedient (if we discount their occasional tantrums), but they make the best consumers because they have little natural sales resistance. — location: 971 ^ref-4233

An independent mind is the worst danger of all, but twelve years spent in a school chair (and now in front of a computer terminal or television, etc.), will convert the most crowded inner life into a virtually blank slate. — location: 976 ^ref-57768

The trouble with open-source learning, as far as policymakers are concerned, is that it almost guarantees an independent mind and character will develop — not a cosmetic simulation of those things, which schooling cultivates. — location: 978 ^ref-57689

taking charge of mixing your own education leads to a healthy self-regard — and confident folks are considerably less manageable than anxious ones. — location: 979 ^ref-63018

Andrew Carnegie, one of the principal architects of the new command and control system saw its drawbacks clearly; he said it would act to some degree as an anti-meritocracy, denying a goodly number of the best quality people in every field the leadership their merit should have earned them — but on the whole Carnegie thought it was a fair bargain: exchanging merit for social stability and protection of capital. — location: 982 ^ref-45763

a prime purpose of the new institutional schooling was to teach self-alienation (in the interests of state and corporate security), and that this could be best accomplished in dark, airless corridors. — location: 987 ^ref-13848

highly centralized mass production economies take on the character of oligarchies, they can’t allow natural processes of capitalism to go unregulated; the creative destruction which Schumpeter saw as central to the health of market economoies can’t be allowed to occur naturally. That’s what the expression “too big to be allowed to fail” heard so frequently these days, along with its corollary, “bail-out” should signal to anyone with a modicum of economic training. — location: 990 ^ref-52719

Highly centralized mass production economies can’t function well without colonizing individual minds and converting them into a mass mind. — location: 998 ^ref-36961

The collective rituals of lower grades are about habit training, about practicing attention and fealty to authority. In this way, independent consciousness can be undermined in its formative stages. — location: 1002 ^ref-46925

The opposite of mass-mindedness is dialectical-mindedness. A tremendous example of this is buried in the foundational religious documents of western culture, in the story of young Jesus closely questioning elders in the temple after slipping away from his parents, itself a contrarian action. — location: 1004 ^ref-41663

Complex minds are always dialectical. Aristotle sets that as a basic requirement of being fully human, but because the reality of dialectical minds is that they always challenge assumptions and take nothing for granted, their presence in large numbers poses acute problems for corporate business and corporate government. — location: 1007 ^ref-12374

Overproduction would have strangled capital accumulation by posing continuous competition — and without capital accumulation, no dominant corporations. Far from production as an ideal, it was consumption that had to be encouraged. School had to train in consumption habits: listening to others, moving on a bell or horn signal without questioning, becoming impressionable — more accurately, gullible — in order to do well on tests. — location: 1017 ^ref-52747

For many years America’s promise to the rest of the world’s peoples was that if they could only manage to get here, no feudal order would thwart that dream. — location: 1021 ^ref-27250

after the Civil War, the argument between entrepreneurial values — which inevitably celebrate open-source learning — and industrial values — by their nature feudal — was over. — location: 1022 ^ref-55185

To enlist public opinion behind this utopian transformation, a pathological state of youth, heretofore unrecognized by history, was designed by G. Stanley Hall of Johns Hopkins University. He called it adolescence and debuted the condition in a huge two-volume study of that name, published in 1904. — location: 1027 ^ref-58666

Hall (immensely influential in school circles at the beginning of the 20th century) identified adolescence as a dangerously irrational state of human growth requiring psychological controls inculcated through schooling. — location: 1030 ^ref-1459

— by crippling the American arguments among ideas, peoples, sections, religions — through one-size-fits-all schooling. The hope for unending argument had been built into our very founding documents, into the guarantees of free speech and access to deadly weaponry given common citizens. — location: 1038 ^ref-24681

Power was to be kept decentralized in the original conception of the United States, and experts kept in their place: decision-making was for ordinary people, not specialists. — location: 1042 ^ref-39574

Prior to the heavy-duty interventions of social engineering into the growing-up time, America — open-source educated for two hundred years — was a spectacularly resourceful and inventive society. — location: 1048 ^ref-2960

earth-shaking–the liberty given to ordinary Americans really was. Nothing like the creative energy being released had ever been seen before, or was even dreamed of as possible. — location: 1050 ^ref-5021

invention is the province of youthful insight; cut that spring of ideas off by embedding the young in a network of rules and judgements, and you should expect important negative consequences. — location: 1052 ^ref-2663

after adolescence was professionalized, a decline in the numbers of patent applications by Americans occurred. After WWII, when institutionalized schooling including college and kindergarten grew by leaps and bounds, that decline accelerated. Universal schooling had weakened the imagination, just as Spinoza predicted it would in 1690, and Fichte predicted in the second decade of the 19th century. — location: 1053 ^ref-38746

both those men were heartily in favor of that weakening; their school schemes were for the benefit of the “best” people. But if those relative ancients could work out the school mechanism and its negative effects long before it existed, surely you can, too. — location: 1056 ^ref-36034

imaginative individuals are notoriously unmanageable and unpredictable, because they are irrepressibly inventive. — location: 1059 ^ref-25796

that if he ever builds a brand new educational system he will “build it around making mistakes.” That’s almost the operational definition of open-source education, sharpening your own personal feedback loops through experience and mistakes. — location: 1126 ^ref-20693

Smith regarded the insatiable desire to make a lot of money as a mental disease. As do I. — location: 1140 ^ref-6057

Treating customers as if they matter more than profit should sound tantalizingly familiar to you, if you’ve been paying attention. It’s an echo of Paul’s directive that loving your neighbor (and your enemies) is the only way to win at life. — location: 1141 ^ref-58270

adding value to others is the only way to add value to yourself. If you aren’t useful you must be useless — and nobody wants that. — location: 1144 ^ref-57783

After the post-WWII boom years of the 1950s, school — one time servant of corporate America — morphed into the largest corporation of all. It became the master corporation bleeding resources from the productive economy in a parasitic relationship which had no governor on its growth, — location: 1156 ^ref-28569

For Paul, excessive regulation ruins the quality of life and corrupts leadership by requiring bureaucrats to enforce the rules, and more officials to regulate those officials. Ad infinitum. — location: 1184 ^ref-22242

the conflict between interest groups whose income and status derives from keeping things as they are, and an insurgency whose needs have been neglected by the entrenched management and which demands profound change. — location: 1187 ^ref-50494

Through the three-headed rule monster of school and college, corporations, and government, American society has been radically de- individualized, one in every five American jobs is some form of oversight over the behavior of others. — location: 1198 ^ref-22329

What America has to show for 50 years of continuous warfare against weak, stone-age opponents, is this: besides crippling our future with a reckless expenditure of capital on products which produce nothing, like weaponry, and destroy themselves in use, we have notified every corner of the world that our overwhelming military isn’t overwhelming at all and can be beaten by ordinary people of courage, with primitive military hardware, who refuse to be intimidated. — location: 1214 ^ref-318

Our reasons to fight are locked up in secret meetings and memos known to a small fraction of the population — the same fraction which, not surprisingly, once upon a time gave us forced institutional schooling. — location: 1219 ^ref-40187

Formulaic schooling is worthless to common citizens, even destructive. It’s only useful to policymakers and managers. It must be killed, not modified. Attempts to tinker with its ruthless algorithms prolongs our society’s agony and makes the situation worse. — location: 1229 ^ref-39345

Reach into the public bazaar for guidance, not to old-fashioned cathedral builders who created the mess we’re in (and will recreate eternally if given the chance). Yes, it will take courage, and no, I don’t expect leadership of either American poltical party to find it. But you can. — location: 1231 ^ref-55662

what really matters: good health, good relationships, and good, satisfying work. — location: 1234 ^ref-1203

Those walks were transcendental experiences of a very high order; even at an age when many experiences seemed transcendental, they were outstanding. As an old man, I now see they were easily the richest family experience I was ever to have. — location: 1248 ^ref-32805

The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man. — location: 1272 ^ref-24894

Real education can only begin out of a foundation of self-awareness. Know the truth of yourself or you are nothing but a pathetic human resource. Your life will have missed it’s point. — location: 1273 ^ref-32888

schooling is a matter of habit and attitude training. It takes place from the outside in. Education is a matter of self-mastery, first; then self-enlargement, even self-transcendence — as all possibilities of the human spirit open themselves into zones for exploration and understanding. — location: 1279 ^ref-25365

Education must be largely self-initiated, a tapestry woven out of broad experience, constant introspection, ability to concentrate on one’s purpose in spite of distractions, a combination of curiosity, patience, and intense watchfulness, and it requires substantial trial and error risk-taking, along with a considerable ability to take feedback from the environment — to learn from mistakes. — location: 1289 ^ref-56257

how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong; even if your enthusiasm is phony. — location: 1313 ^ref-1215

Growth and self-mastery are reserved for those who vigorously self-direct, like Stanley: planning, doing, creating, reflecting, freely associating, taking chances, punching the lights out on your tormentors. — location: 1321 ^ref-36173

The official economy we have constructed demands constantly renewed supplies of leveled, spiritless, passive, anxious, friendless, family- less people who can be scrapped and replaced endlessly, and who will perform at maximum efficiency until their own time comes to be scrap; people who think the difference between Coke and Pepsi, or round hamburgers versus square ones, are subjects worthy of argument. — location: 1324 ^ref-2840

As our economy has been shaped by its architects, it relies upon encouraging frenzy for novelty, for fashion in more than clothing, all the way to telephones. It’s an attitude which induces nonstop consumption in a heady atmosphere of “out with the old, in with the new;” to escape from shame, an addiction to the spirit of the Cole Porter song, Anything Goes. — location: 1336 ^ref-32689

Capital operates most efficiently in climates without public opposition, where critical thinking among ordinary people is in a primitive state, so the public becomes an inept opponent. — location: 1355 ^ref-2146

while the American economy had grown massively through the 1960s, real spendable working class wages hadn’t grown at all for 30 years. — location: 1366 ^ref-49935

The steep decline in common prosperity over 90 years of intense forced schooling drove both parents from the home to work, depositing their children in the management systems of daycare and extended schooling. Despite a century-long harangue that schooling is the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred. Wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century’s end than at its beginnings. — location: 1369 ^ref-6396

The Amish are legendary good neighbors, first to volunteer in times of need in the larger non-Amish community. They open their farms to ghetto children and frequently rear handicapped children from the non-Amish world whom nobody else wants. — location: 1380 ^ref-50831

no two people are alike, all “averages” are lies, and nobody can be accurately contained by numbers and graphs. The use of these against those too weak to resist is the Bed of Procrustes, brought into modern life. — location: 1403 ^ref-63401

We need to abandon the notion — and punish those who retain it — that ordinary people are too stupid, irresponsible, and childish to look out for themselves. We need to honor our founding documents and founding ideas, to accept that each one of us has the right to live as he or she deems wise, and if the way chosen would mean disaster for global corporations — location: 1404 ^ref-16479

Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want. — location: 1451 ^ref-29191

You can’t self-teach without inner strength and a measure of gravity, without opportunities to be alone, to have broad experience with people and great challenges. — location: 1462 ^ref-10340

looking, like Diogenes, for one honest board member or administrator, one person who looked to be worried. But all I ever heard were waves of self-congratulation and a smug indifference to the suffering we were causing. — location: 1507 ^ref-52583

the poison pill in merit proposals. Merit would certainly NOT go to the meritorious — as a student, parent or citizen would define merit — but as a school administrator would. When 22% of the teachers don’t survive more than a year, the caste system that corrupts our schools is partially to blame. Nobody ever bothers to ask the 100 to 150 teachers who leave each year why they left. That’s because everyone already knows. — location: 1517 ^ref-32573

The degree of disrespect our nation has assigned its ordinary population wouldn’t be possible unless somewhere in the command centers it hadn’t been decided that common men and women should be stripped of any power to rebel. And that they could be lied to without compunction, because their dignity didn’t count. Or their lives. — location: 1538 ^ref-12429

too much was at stake — not just money, but careers, patronage and ideological status — to allow any changes which would actually occur. — location: 1566 ^ref-19485

the mission of ambition and survival trumps a commitment to excellence every time. — location: 1569 ^ref-52741

The most curious commentary on these kids is the thousands of hours they spend in not exploring, not playing, not seeking opportunities for personal gain — but in watching other people on television, in music videos and computer games. — location: 1586 ^ref-26968

I’ve come to believe that good teachers are more dangerous than bad ones. They keep this sick institution alive. — location: 1592 ^ref-13543

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. — location: 1616 ^ref-8844

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are thirteen, you can’t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school, I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. — location: 1620 ^ref-56803

I almost never met a learning-disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted-and-talented one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values that we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling. — location: 1625 ^ref-27757

School is a religion. Without understanding this holy-mission aspect, you’re certain to misperceive what takes place there as a result of human stupidity or venality or class warfare. — location: 1641 ^ref-19539

they feel certain they must know something, because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain convinced of this until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing, or panic attacks brought on by meaninglessness manage to upset the precarious balance of their incomplete adult lives. — location: 1650 ^ref-12013

If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe the dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model), or is nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model), or society’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic-elitist model), or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is necessary to address the problem of the dumb. — location: 1657 ^ref-567

The possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the many careers devoted to tending them may seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real. — location: 1663 ^ref-43294

The country has been sold the idea Hector is the problem of modern schooling. That misperception is the demon we face, under its many guises and behind its shape-shifting rhetoric. Forced schooling itself was conceived to be the front line in a war against chaos, the beginning of the effort to keep Hector and his kind in protective custody. Important people believe, with the fervor of religious zealots, that civilization can survive only if the irrational, unpredictable impulses of human nature are continually beaten back and confined until their demonic vitality is sapped. — location: 1700 ^ref-38330

a solution would have to be found in the natural proclivity of the young to move around physically, not sit, before we suppress that urge with confinement to seats in school and with commercial blandishments to watch performers rather than to perform oneself. — location: 1719 ^ref-61160

a suppression of natural feedback circuits which allow us to learn from our mistakes. Somebody trying to learn to sail alone in a small boat will inevitably tack too far left and too far right when sailing into a wind, when the destination is straight ahead, but practice will correct that beginner’s error because feedback will instruct the sailor’s reaction and judgement. — location: 1722 ^ref-32448

The absolute necessity for feedback from everywhere in taking an education, (even from one’s enemies), forced me to look closely at how rigidly students were ordered about — in a way which made little use of their innate abilities to grow through feedback. — location: 1729 ^ref-39483

real experience is subtracted from young lives, and simulated experience added in its place. — location: 1736 ^ref-34367

For many years a variety of outside influences — television, computers and government schooling chief among them — have conspired to wean children away from their urgent need to be out and about. The end result has been a nation of angry, frightened, uncompassionate and incomplete boys and girls in place of men and women. — location: 1794 ^ref-60658

In all failing societies, respect for obligation and family declines along with compassion for one’s fellows — to be replaced by a preoccupation with amusement, diversion, and predation. — location: 1807 ^ref-33880

School elevates winning so far above its ostensible goal of learning that periodically public scandals occur when investigation reveals that even elite students know very little. — location: 1842 ^ref-7841

intellectual power, creative insight, and good character was being diminished — location: 1857 ^ref-44808

When you believe in determinism — biological, psychological, sociological, or theological (and schools believe in all of those in various times and places), the very idea of feedback leading to growth must be held at arm’s length. For all its legends of social mobility and intellectual growth, school operates out of a belief in social order — that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. — location: 1868 ^ref-60577

that systems incorporate ways to defend internal integrity. — location: 1909 ^ref-59356

bureaucracies more than a century ago and concluded that, without exception, their nominal missions — defending the country, delivering the mail, collecting garbage, etc.—were always secondary to the primary mission: preserving the bureaucracy. — location: 1917 ^ref-33682

school is only one of many institutions in American society patterned after a scheme to confuse the public, one first put in place in ancient Sparta — management by cleverly managed illusions. — location: 1919 ^ref-39155

Only education (he called it “educational schooling”) will heal the wounds to community and individuality caused by capitalism. — location: 1932 ^ref-16846

“It may be,” said Dr. Wiehe, “that any program conducted in schools induces contempt in students.” — location: 1991 ^ref-39758

Without his contempt for school, which led him to run away and hide instead, Roger would have burned to ashes with the rest. — location: 1998 ^ref-31049

Part of the answer lies in the political nature of mass schooling — a characteristic inherent in any bureaucracy. It’s not so much kids think in these abstract terms, it’s the widespread understanding among the young that school isn’t about them (and their interests, curiosities and futures), but exclusively about the wishes of other people. — location: 2000 ^ref-7117

ease and sophistication with spoken language is substantially more important in life than reading. — location: 2033 ^ref-52029

The ideal hireling is reflexively obedient, cheerfully enthusiastic about following orders, ever eager to please. — location: 2264 ^ref-45228