{"id":232,"date":"2005-08-04T20:40:57","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T20:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/04\/dumbing-us-down-let-the-discussion-begin\/"},"modified":"2005-08-04T20:40:57","modified_gmt":"2005-08-04T20:40:57","slug":"dumbing-us-down-let-the-discussion-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/dumbing-us-down-let-the-discussion-begin\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumbing Us Down: Let the Discussion Begin!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dumbing Us Down<\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/span> by former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto is a no-holds-barred critique of compulsory schooling.<\/p>\n

In my next few blog posts, I’m going to share\u00a0interesting passages from this book.\u00a0 I hope they will provoke both thought and discussion, and also serve as a boost to your motivation for educating your children at home.<\/p>\n

At the risk of (or perhaps for the sake of) stirring up a bit of controversy, I’ll\u00a0confess that it struck me that some of his comments regarding compulsory institutional schooling could apply to some school-at-home approaches\u00a0which slavishly reproduce the institutional model without taking advantage of the freedom and individuality which home education makes possible.<\/p>\n

During 26 years as a public schoolteacher, Gatto “began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible that I had been hired not to enlarge children\u2019s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent<\/em> children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.” (p. xii)<\/p>\n

Let’s all consider whether our own approaches to educating our children are at risk of preventing our children from learning how to think and act, of coaxing them into dependent behavior.<\/p>\n

Mary Jo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dumbing Us Down by former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto is a no-holds-barred critique of compulsory schooling. In my next few blog posts, I’m going to share\u00a0interesting passages from this book.\u00a0 I hope they will provoke both thought and discussion, and also serve as a boost to your motivation for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}