{"id":257,"date":"2005-08-10T20:49:23","date_gmt":"2005-08-10T20:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/?p=257"},"modified":"2010-05-08T20:49:49","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T20:49:49","slug":"dumbing-us-down-mass-schooling-is-anti-democratic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/dumbing-us-down-mass-schooling-is-anti-democratic\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumbing Us Down: Mass-Schooling Is Anti-Democratic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell, probably the greatest  mathematician of this century, its greatest philosopher, and a close  relation of the King of England to boot, saw that mass-schooling in the  United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it was a  scheme to artificially deliver national unity by eliminating human  variation and by eliminating the forge that produces varation: the  family<em>. <\/em>According to Lord Russell, mass-schooling produced a  recognizably <em>American<\/em> student: anti-intellectual, superstitious,  lacking self-confidence, and with less of what Russell called \u2018inner  freedom\u2019 than his or her counterpart in any other nation he knew of,  past or present. These schooled children became citizens, he said, with a  thin \u2018mass character,\u2019 holding excellence and aesthestics equally in  contempt, inadequate to the personal crises of their lives.&#8221; (John  Taylor Gatto,\u00a0<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>, pp. 77-78)<\/p>\n<p>This is a pretty scathing critique, but I can&#8217;t find any fault with  it.\u00a0 What do you think?<\/p>\n<p>Mary Jo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell, probably the greatest mathematician of this century, its greatest philosopher, and a close relation of the King of England to boot, saw that mass-schooling in the United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it was a scheme to artificially deliver national unity by eliminating human variation and by eliminating &#8230; <a title=\"Dumbing Us Down: Mass-Schooling Is Anti-Democratic\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/dumbing-us-down-mass-schooling-is-anti-democratic\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Dumbing Us Down: Mass-Schooling Is Anti-Democratic\">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-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","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=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}