This Bard has been perusing the jaw-dropping, eye-popping Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, an award winning educator. It is highly recommended summer reading, and nearly impossible to stop reading.
"Once you trust yourself to go mind-to-mind with the great intellects, artists, scientists, warriors, and philosophers, you are finally free. In America, before we had forced schooling, an astonishing range of unlikely people knew reading was like Samson's locks--something that could help make them formidable, that could teach them their rights and how to defend those rights, could lead them towards self-determination, free from intimidation by experts. Those same unlikely people knew that the power bestowed through reading could give them insight into the ways of the human heart, so they would not be cheated or fooled so easily, and that it could provide an inexhaustible store of useful knowledge--advice on how to do just about anything" (John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education)
Scales are dropping from these eyes, and my heart breaking, and thankfulness abounding at the bravery of my mother.
3 comments:
I think I read one of Gatto's books the summer before I went to Petra. I remember seeing it laying around Tim's house and I borrowed it. It really got me fired up against the public schools. Little did I know where I would be the following year!
I think Mom feels bad that she didn't enroll us all in public school, but I always tell her how thankful I am that she didn't (until I forced her to!). We really did have the oddest education and when I try to explain it to other people they can't imagine it ever being a good thing except in our 'special' case.
Children need interaction with other children. They need to learn how to conform and what the world thinks is proper. They can't possibly figure things out on there own or teach themselves!
Isn't it funny and hypocritical how the youth always rail against "the man," big business, and the system, yet never see that they ARE a product of "the Man," and are the biggest business of all, and plugged into a mechanical system in which each, according to their assigned caste, is given a script to live out?
What breaks my heart is that so many have been limited by their "caste," and that since schooling became big business literacy and creativity of minority groups has declined.
Would there even be such a thing as "minority groups" without the invention of such a caste by the philanthropic misanthropes?
Now, why is the question of socialization always the one that people pick as the hill to die upon, rather than education?
I, myself, find great pleasure in parading my "social retardation," and always have. Because I'm socially retarded I have fewer inhibitions and tend to be more outgoing than those not socially retarded, and don't have to take any meds for fear or panic attacks.
I'm naturally annoying and open-minded, without any artificial ingredients or therapy to help. And because I'm so sustainable I don't have to waste garlic on vampire control or buy time with dialogue. And because I'm not greedy about collecting social approval, I leave enough socialization for those that are disadvanteged in society, those poor in community approval.
I heard through the grapevine, that someone we know in argument about socialization, said that making tons of friends and fitting in wasn't the most important thing in their life. Then, I think, they may have said something about amassing the largest bag of gummi bears and Mountain Dew being vastly more important.
Post a Comment