Weapons of Mass Instruction
by John Taylor Gatto.
When my children were born, the decision was made to provide them with the best Christian education possible. State-tax/public/statist schools were never an option for our family. The increasing corruption and anti-Christian environment in those schools made the choice easy.
At first, Christian day-schools were used, then we became one of the hand-full of families in Tennessee to teach our daughter at home. Things have not changed. The situation in in statist schools is worse today than it was those thirty-odd years ago.
Over the years, I have learned more and more about the “why” of the state-tax schools’ problem from a variety of sources and a great number of books and magazine articles. John Taylor Gatto has now done us all the favour of writing a succinct and thorough analysis of the problems of state sponsored education sponsored in his book, Weapons of Mass Instruction.
I have often wondered at the majority of public high-school graduates who cannot function as adults. Gatto, a New York state Teacher-of-the-Year, writes in the Prologue of his book, “By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools – with their long-term, cell-block-style forced confinement of both students and teachers – as virtual factories of childishness.” “Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness.” (All quotations are from Weapons of Mass Instruction.)
The Prussian System
Our “American” schools (both public and private) are fashioned after the Prussian system of education. The Prussians were well-known for their regimented society and their efficient military. “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.” A society divided is a society which cannot find its way. So it was there in Prussia and still is here in America that we have a society of people able and willing to take orders.
“Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.” A society of servants requires a class of leaders. “One in every five American jobs is some form of oversight over the behavior of others.”
Providing Workers for the Elite
The reasons for the devolution of education and the corresponding disintegration of society are several, but interrelated. Gatto posits, “The transition from an entrepreneurial economy to a mass production economy, which began soon after the end of hostilities [of the Civil War], wrenched the country from its freedom-loving course and placed it along the path toward industrial capitalism – with its need for visible underclasses and a large, rootless proletariat to make it work.”
Woodrow Wilson, as president of Princeton, spoke to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “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 forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” That “very much larger class” of which he spoke includes you and me and our children!
Forcing Their System Upon Us
The system attempts to induce us to give them our children by a variety of manipulations: criticizing our lack of formal training, denying that the children have learned anything (by rigging the tests), and by accusing us of isolationism. Those attacks have not worked, so the greater manipulation of the economy comes into play. After inflation is factored in, the purchasing power of a working couple in 1995 was only 8 percent greater than for a single working man in 1905. “The steep decline in common prosperity over 90 years of intense forced depositing their children in the management systems of daycare and extended schooling.”
What Public Schools Give Us
“Only 31 percent of college-educated Americans can fully comprehend a newspaper story, down from 40 percent a decade ago.” –National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, August, 2006
“35 percent of the young regret their university experience and don’t consider the time and money invested worth it; more than half said they learned nothing of use.” –Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2006
In 2006, the University of Connecticut set out to discover how much learning happens in a student between entering as freshmen and graduating as a senior. Five academic areas were selected to measure, using 14,000 students as 50 American colleges, including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown. At 16 of those 50 – including Yale, Brown, and Georgetown – graduating seniors knew less than incoming freshmen. Negative growth had occurred. In the other 34, no measurable change had taken place.
The United States, traditional land of the free, now jails 25% of all prisoners on earth, 90% for non-violent crimes. With 5% of the global population, we are five times more eager than average to lock up our fellow citizens, six times more likely than China is to do the same thing.
Closing Quote
In closing, I will repeat a statement from page 124 made by Walter Lippmann,
“…during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state … the schools and colleges have therefore been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live … deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own mind and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization … the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it. I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and there is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.”
Walter Lippmann said this nearly seventy years ago, in 1940. Because the erosion of our ideals, values, freedoms and education has been so gradual, we have not noticed the poverty we now live in. The conclusion is simply this — if you want your child to be the average ignorant, unthinking, unimaginative nineteen-year-old, send them to public school. No amount of family-time will be able to compensate for the emotional and intellectual damage done by public education.
Weapons of Mass Instruction is well worth purchasing, reading and passing your copy on to another.
Purchase Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto at Logos Bookstore, 4012 Hillsboro Pike, Nashville 615 297-5388
(Reviewed August 2009)