{"id":239,"date":"2005-08-05T20:43:04","date_gmt":"2005-08-05T20:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/?p=239"},"modified":"2010-05-08T20:43:38","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T20:43:38","slug":"dumbing-us-down-the-origins-of-modern-schooling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/dumbing-us-down-the-origins-of-modern-schooling\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumbing Us Down: The Origins of Modern Schooling"},"content":{"rendered":"

“How did these awful places, these \u2018schools\u2019 come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But \u2018modern schooling\u2019 as we no know it is a by-product of the two \u2018Red Scares\u2019 of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because old-line \u2018American\u2019 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<\/strong> must have been the consternation with which these same \u2018Americans\u2019 regarded the movement of African-Americans through the society in the wake of the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching\u2014confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, \/ conditional self-esteem, surveillance\u2014all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius.” (John Taylor Gatto,\u00a0Dumbing Us Down<\/span><\/a>\"\", pp. <\/span>17-18)<\/p>\n

“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<\/span><\/a>\"\", p. <\/span>26)<\/p>\n

I think it’s interesting that Gatto identifies school as “a jail for children.”\u00a0 I have long thought that most school buildings I have seen resemble jails, just from the architecture!<\/p>\n

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?<\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/span>\u2014another very interesting book. <\/span><\/p>\n

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

“How did these awful places, these \u2018schools\u2019 come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But \u2018modern schooling\u2019 as we no know it is a by-product of the two \u2018Red Scares\u2019 of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution … 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-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","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=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}