(no subject)

[botias]

Well, I did get info about the local Jazzercise classes, the next one is tomorrow. I called one of the leaders at 8:30 last night, so I could meet the deadline I set for myself for taking some sort of positive action that day. I hope it's not lame. On the upside, the routines are apparently the same all over the country, so if I like it, I won't have to leave it behind.

Meanwhile, that history of public school book is scaring me. Whether or not it was deliberately designed that way, as the author contends, it's clear from my own experience of it that the public school experience is not designed to promote literacy, critical thinking, respect for family and community, self-confidence, individuality and social skills. It's occurred to me before that the only adult situation it remotely resembles is prison. And the way they're medicating around 25% of school children now to make them more pliable and easier to handle. What kind of adults does this create? I know at least one parent who was told by the school that they wouldn't take her child unless he was on Ritalin, and being a single working parent, she feels she has no option.

The author points out that public school generates the perfect worker and the perfect consumer. If people were convinced of their own competence and full of ideas of their own on how to create goods and services, who would fill the factories and cubicles en masse? Furthermore, the author points out that reading too many books and after awhile you become 'quirky', as I had already observed that the author has. The success of mass production depends on an unquirky consumer base that wants exactly what their neighbor wants and lots of it.

I had read a bit about the industrial revolution and social Darwinism, but always from the point of view of the industrial magnates' policies as regard to adult workers, never their ideas about social planning. While I never thought I would see a positive side to the Holocaust, Germany's 'proactive' approach so shamed the movement in the United States (the first country in the world to legalize forced sterilization of the 'unfit') that it drove it underground and cost it much of its momentum. Anyway, it all makes a scary kind of sense and warrents a closer look.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I take it this is from a book? Which book?

I read almost all of Lies My Teacher Told Me when I was in Humboldt in July; I don't remember if I told you about that or not. It wasn't quite as radical about the whole school institution, but it was very scathing about history textbooks.

[botias.livejournal.com]

The book is listed at the top of my previous journal entry. The whole idea of textbooks, specially created books of approved ideas, seems counter to the purpose of education, now that I think about it. It also helps support the idea that the commoner is not capable of learning to read scientific publications or historic documents for themselves. It wasn't until some of my more advanced courses in college that I was encouraged to read and understand current published work in scientific journals, but any motivated 12-year-old could decipher the stuff. From the other direction, these publications are full of unnecessary jargon. While I hesitate to say this is a deliberate attempt to reduce the accessibility of the information, there are almost certainly exclusionary impulses involved. Why is public schooling designed to isolate a certain class of children from 'real' knowledge if the purpose is create knowledgable people? It begins to look as if the original purpose of compulsory public school was to provide a dumbed-down and obedient 'human resource' for industry, and to experiment with the idea that the state could produce better people than families could. While the goals have changed or been muted, the school system continues to operate in the way it was designed and everyone wonders why there is so much dissatisfaction with it. Interesting ideas.