“How did these awful places, these ‘schools’ come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But ‘modern schooling’ as we no know it is a by-product of the two ‘Red Scares’ of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line ‘American’ families were appalled by the native cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants of the 1840s and felt repugnance toward the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third contributing factor in creating a jail for children called school must have been the consternation with which these same ‘Americans’ regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching—confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, / conditional self-esteem, surveillance—all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius.” (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down
“Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.” (Dumbing Us Down
I think it’s interesting that Gatto identifies school as “a jail for children.” I have long thought that most school buildings I have seen resemble jails, just from the architecture!
Gatto’s assertions about the motivations for our current educational system are supported by the writings of Samuel Blumenfeld, such as Is Public Education Necessary?
Mary Jo
You have to tell what your day TODAY was like…really! Not what you wish it’d been like or what you’d planned for it to be like, but how it really turned out. Be sure to title it “Fly on the Wall” so we can look for those blogs. Tag about five or so friends and we can all have fun being a fly on the wall of someone else’s homeschool for a day.
When our 21 year son was four years old, John Gatto
invited our homeschool group free of charge to come hear him speak about homeschooling. It was a memorable night we will never forget! The speakers were all dressed in their black tuxedos praising anyone who even thought about homeschooling. This was in Carnegie Hall in N.Y.C and it was packed. I can’t remember any famous names their. I only remember how happy we were to meet a few thousand other people who were homeschooling in NYC and to begin our homeschool journey.
Wow! Hearing tuxedoed speakers, including Gatto, in Carnegie Hall praising homeschoolers. What a way to begin your homeschool journey! Thanks for sharing.
Mary Jo