{"id":237,"date":"2005-08-04T20:42:35","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T20:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/?p=237"},"modified":"2010-05-08T20:43:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T20:43:00","slug":"dumbing-us-down-intellectual-dependence-or-independence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/dumbing-us-down-intellectual-dependence-or-independence\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumbing Us Down: Intellectual Dependence or Independence?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Taylor Gatto says that one of the seven lessons of our current  system of compulsory institutional schooling is intellectual dependency:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the  most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better  trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives&#8221; (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/redirect?link_code=ur2&amp;camp=1789&amp;tag=mjtate-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;path=tg\/detail\/-\/0865714487\/qid=1123213605\/sr=8-1\/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_1?v=glance%26s=books%26n=507846\"><span style=\"color: #000066;\">Dumbing Us Down<\/span><\/a><span style=\"color: #000066;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=mjtate-20&amp;l=ur2&amp;o=1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/>, p. <\/span>8).<\/p>\n<p>I am by no means an\u00a0&#8220;unschooler,&#8221; but I delight to see my boys  initiating some of their own learning, just for the love of it. They are  required to complete certain lessons, of course,\u00a0whether they are  particularly intrigued or not, but they are also learning intellectual  independence.\u00a0 Some of their most significant learning has come not from  assigned &#8220;schoolwork&#8221; but from their independent reading in their  favorite areas.\u00a0 Forrest used to\u00a0take the <em>Kingfisher\u00a0Illustrated  History of the World<\/em> to bed every night, and Andrew has picked up  an amazing amount of scientific knowledge from some Charlie Brown  encyclopedias he selected at a library sale a few years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Mary Jo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Taylor Gatto says that one of the seven lessons of our current system of compulsory institutional schooling is intellectual dependency: &#8220;Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of &#8230; <a title=\"Dumbing Us Down: Intellectual Dependence or Independence?\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/dumbing-us-down-intellectual-dependence-or-independence\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Dumbing Us Down: Intellectual Dependence or Independence?\">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-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","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=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}