What accounts for the anti-school youth culture often depicted in popular rock music?
Are you too young to remember these jams? Am I too old?
Against School?
have you been crippled by public education?
agree? disagree? respond.
“One afternoon when I was seven I complained to [my grandfather] of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible” (33).
agree? disagree? respond.
“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…” (34).
agree? disagree? respond.
“We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of ‘success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, ‘schooling’ […] Why do Americans confuse education with just such a [schooling] system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?” (34). -- --- -
Are we showing up at school but missing our education?
agree? disagree? respond.
“The aim of public education is not ‘to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be farther from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…and that is its aim everywhere else’” (qtd. from Mencken 35).
agree? disagree? respond.
“But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens—all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’” (36).
agree? disagree? respond.
In quick groups, define each of these purposes of modern schooling as described by Inglas, and talk about how these purposes match your own experiences.
Thoughts on Inglis’ list of “actual” goals for public education? (36 – 37)
Adjustive/adaptive function
Integrating function
Diagnostic/directive function
Differentiating function
Selective function
Propaedeutic function
agree? disagree? respond.
“Schools are meant to tag the unfit—with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments—clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from reproductive sweepstakes” (37).
agree? disagree? respond.
“If children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up” (38).
“It’s perfectly obvious…”
John Taylor Gatto
This will be
replaced
by the player.
John Gatto on how children spend their time
can we expect more of ourselves?
Must we resort to the old tired ways of the carrot or the stick?
Aren’t we capable of more than that?
Think of what you could achieve, who you could become…
