redstar2000
18th December 2003, 21:36
Here are some excerpts from an article that I found to be very perceptive.
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Alfred Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education...makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s...Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it [would be] unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose--the actual purpose--of modern schooling into six basic functions...
1. The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2. The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3. The diagnostic or directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits--and not one step further.
5. The selective function. This refers...to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit--with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments--clearly enough that their peers will reject them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor...
...There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that 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.
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From: "AGAINST SCHOOL--How public education cripples our kids and why" by John Taylor Gatto, in Harper's Magazine, September 2003, pp.36-37.
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To which I can only add that while you may not "need" Karl Marx, he helps a lot! :D
http://anarchist-action.org/forums/images/smiles/redstar.gif
The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/)
A site about communist ideas
......................................
Alfred Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education...makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s...Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it [would be] unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose--the actual purpose--of modern schooling into six basic functions...
1. The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2. The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3. The diagnostic or directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits--and not one step further.
5. The selective function. This refers...to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit--with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments--clearly enough that their peers will reject them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor...
...There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that 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.
.....................................
From: "AGAINST SCHOOL--How public education cripples our kids and why" by John Taylor Gatto, in Harper's Magazine, September 2003, pp.36-37.
.....................................
To which I can only add that while you may not "need" Karl Marx, he helps a lot! :D
http://anarchist-action.org/forums/images/smiles/redstar.gif
The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/)
A site about communist ideas