The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
Showing posts with label john taylor gatto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john taylor gatto. Show all posts
I don't want to be a 'leader' or a 'politician', yet I desire - my very soul and body demands, craves, endures to experience - that the exercise of State Policy, that the operations and outcomes of State Policy - if there is to be a such an Institution as the State, (which remains a pertinent line of investigation at all times on matters like these and many others, as to it's validity) it must manifestly nurture all the people, and the environment within which we all live, which we share as biological equals, though vastly diverse. The evidence is real! It always is... painfully so.
In truth, I don't want anyone to be a 'politician', or a 'leader'.
I'd much rather support administrators who willingly, transparently, happily take on the various roles required and available within State Institutions, that they would exercise their chosen roles professionally, with joy, and if in stressful situations, behave calmly with a view to resolution, all guided by fluid and continuous policy and decision making directly from within the grass roots of Society, informed by expert advice as required as much as by common human empathy and kindness.
I'd be more than happy to support such a Nurturant structure. A Nurturant Society is my bag!
I see no impediment to such a happy state, other than the status quo, learned helplessness, and other stuff ... no need to list it all.
No impediment as such. because it is our biological mandate, it is a seriously ancient mandate, a deeply biologically material basis, it is the expression of a proven biological asset, that lies at the roots of genuine democracy, which is nothing less than that more or less empathic, and therefore disciplined, mature, playful and adaptive self organizational processes of any given human society, family or community, or self motivated children playing and learning together, across all age groups, that lives the Biology of Nurture Webs.
What we are getting is clearly not working. The History books are littered with much the same, just lower numbers... Their take, the official historians, on pre-history serves to distance us from our native ways through which we humans thrived prior to History... which is like .0001% or less of the time we have been around as human mammals.
So what do I do?
AHA!
Proposed Curriculum for Education Minister, Michael Gove...
A 6 month course.
Modular or Webbed/Networked.
No Further Ministerial work that changes anything or alters any Laws is to be carried out until course completed. Think of it as a Public Audition.
So openings and press briefings, speaking events, constituency work will all continue.... plus ceremonial duties... This keeps the study in context with the experience of many students who have to work ti supplement thier Education, which Gove's generation got for FREE! How nice for them!
All materials to support the students learning are to be freely provided, a reasonable concession and Student Gove may collaborate with other students, colleagues and any other relevant party.
Course Overview.
STUDY AND INTEGRATE THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING IN THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING BY COMPLETING THE FOLLOWING TASKS.
- Work through the writings on Education, Children and Society of John Holt, Alice Miller, Paolo Friere, Ivan Illych, Colin Ward, : all about natural learning, the problems of the 'schooling' system that disrupts natural learning. Also demonstrates ways to recover and change. : TEST: a 10 minute video briefing on the over view of these writers, and their data.
- John Taylor Gatto, on The History of State Education : TEST : Create a large mural/wall chart of the History of State Education aas outlined by Gatto, as a mind map or along the lines of the RSA Animate projects, or in some other graphic manner.
- The Biology and Anthropology of Empathy - cutting edge Science: Write a 10,000 word essay on the current state of awareness and understanding and both academic and grass roots, the potential outcomes of the current state of awareness at the grass roots and in Governance, and examine what needs to be done to facilitate a widespread in-depth dissemination of that information such that it informs both the Public and Institutional Policy Making, and that it is seen as a key element that prioritizes according to the real needs of children as people, rather than workers in an 'economy'. Include all references.
- Homeschooling, democratic schooling, anecdotal evidence, historical 'greats'.... : TEST: Conduct a Radio Interview with three leading exponents in each case, total length 30 minutes, including credits.
- Each TEST is a project. It will not be marked. There's no need. the candidates work will simply be left, archived as a public record of the candidates experience and outcomes.
It will be peer reviewed by the Nation, the Public....
A good result might get the guy a really, really decent job!
And a change in the outcomes for the current and future generations of children, and with that our entire Society.
For as long as can be remembered and longer, The Church, State and 'Charities' have taken children in their 'care'...
And behind closed doors abuses that are as horrific as any committed by the Nazi's, the main Historical Scapegoat taught in Schools and mentioned often in the media as an aberration from the 'norm' were perpetrated upon those beautiful, vulnerable children by those who 'cared' for them.
These crimes were part Policy, part recycled abuse and were designed to 'mold', cripple or destroy those children - in every Country where indigenous peoples were forced off their lands these practices existed and exists to this very day.
The current reporting of the Vatican's crimes is but the tip of the iceberg...
And even today, 'damage limitation' exercises are under way, by all Institutions involved.
The spin, avoidance of responsibility and suppression comes not from shame, but from a desire to protect the status, wealth and power of these Institutions.
The wealth of Scientific Information that confirms the cyclical nature of abuse is routinely suppressed, ignored and co-opted by these Institutions - Ritalin prescribed to 'manage' children who refuse the yoke that was in the very recent past enforced by corporal 'punishment' is an example of current 'tactics' mediated against children and their parents, who for the most part are unwittingly enrolled in the conditioning processes that are very much in use; marketing, propaganda, spin, debt based lives and of course extreme violence is still utilised - Iraq, Afghanistan, Columbia and elsewhere - and the 'public' appear unable to respond.
The victims, the survivors are courageously telling their stories, and a few brave advocates are supporting them.
Some few are recognising the cycles of abuse in their own lives... and breaking them, so that no more abuse is visited upon others within their sphere of influence.
Here is a letter I wrote, that was published in the Irish Times November 2009, with typo errors included ... uneditted.
This is issue runs to the very heart of the State System and Society.
The future will be defined by whether or not these issues are faced up to and dealt with; punishment that is abusive will not help; incarceration of the perpetrators, the spin doctors, the official deniers is a must; full accountability, reparations and the widespread sharing of the information that can help the victims and active support for the victims is a must.
None of us can afford to turn our hearts from these facts....
Here's a nice quote to illustrate the way in which childrens minds were targetted through compulsory state education, on behalf of the Industrialists who were hell-bent on turning States into representatives of business, and to do that they felt it neccessary to exercise mind-control, to deflect dissent, especially reasoned dissent.
You will recognise the elements, and for sure, each of us has fallen foul of these. I know I have.
Charles Pierce, the eminence grise behind William James and John Dewey, architects of Compulsory State Education in the USA wrote :
“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of the will of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed.
Let all possible cause of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehension. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard … unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence….
Let a list of opinions be drawn up to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”
We can see this in operation in the media, and in school text-books. And we can see this in operation in our own minds as we sometimes struggle to grasp the truth of our current situation. Unexamined assumptions are a good guide to those areas of our thinking that have been 'adjusted' to fit into this 'sick society', an adjustment that Martin Luther King made clear was unacceptable.
Here's a few more quotes to flesh this process out a bit.
Woodrow Wilson speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909 :
“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
This is the technology of modern management ……this is the doctrine which drove William James in “Principles of Psychology” (1890), to assign habit-training, not intellectual development, the place of honour in schooling :
“Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what … saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor … it alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive (jobs) from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different strata of society from mixing.”
All of us who attended state schooling have been exposed to and conditioned to accept the imposed and limited ideas that are taught through that education, reinforced through the media and that underpin the success of marketing.
This is the core technology of psychological state control upon which the likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron and the leaders of Indusrty et al depend upon.
Of course they retain that other oh-so familiar stick, that of poverty, physical violence or imprisonment to curtail those few who escape this conditioning. That’s what the War Against Terror and the consistent attack on civil liberties is all about.
It is very important work to understand how this society, the one we (Europeans etc) have all been born into, industrial society, is built upon trauma, subtle as much as gross.
We all have two aspects to deal with in this : the personal (ones own story) and the trans personal (the institutions that are built by dysfunctional people to control other people - police, army, banks, education, prison.
Both aspects must be understood, and worked on. And especially in terms of the various movements and campaigns for change, if this work is not done, the those campaigns are de-facto limited to dealing merely with symptoms, and not root causes. This is the kind of dissent the system likes and tolerates because it does not threaten their position, merely asks them to be 'nicer'.... which they are adept at making it LOOK as if they are being 'nicer'....
Just to pass on some links for anyone who wants to follow their own research.
http://www.naturalchild.com/ - dedicated to promoting awareness of the natural child, and how societal misunderstanding of the natural child affects us all
http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php - Alice Millers, whose main work, "The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing : for your own good" is one of the best on how society treats children, the history of written child rearing texts and societal compliance.. it's a translationfromGerman so fairly challenging to read - more recent works such as "the drama of the gifted child" and "the body never lies" are a bit easier... but all are so worth the effort...
http://www.holtgws.com/ - John Holt, author of "how children learn" and "how children fail" .... this and more on how children naturally learn ... inspired, and one of the best!
http://www.suepalmer.co.uk/ - Sue Palmer, research on children's development, on how early schooling, TV, foods, media affects children's, plenty of research from neuro-science to support her observations...blows the use of 'genetics' as a source of distress out of the water
http://www.selfishcapitalist.com/ - site for writer Oliver James, author of "Affluenza", details the psychological impacts observed in adults, which arise from early childhood, common in the industrialised world. Suggest parents of very young ought to be free of encumbrance to devote time to their children, funded by the state to avoid the depression and psychological distress common in industrialised society. Severe critic of profit/consumerism. Good research, blows the 'genetics' as a source of distress right out of the water...
http://www.davidsmail.freeuk.com/ - David Smail,probably one of the best writers on 'Power Over Other's as trhe root cause of all human dysfunction. The way power is expressed is the problem, the rest is symptom. Great essay on Thatcher are the rise of the 'new age' healing business! Lots of his work is available on-line..
That's enough to get started.... all the best m8.
The following ideas around nature are my own, in that I originated the following concepts, independent of my reading : 'nature does not do stupidity', our 'cells are wild, so are we', 'nature works, so why are we so different', we 'project our concepts and ways onto the natural world, and cannot see nature the way nature experiences self, so we are lost in a country whose language we do not know - which is why industrialised society projects it's own power structures on to nature..."everything in in naturegets what it needs to thrive, bar being eaten"... "THRIVIVAL" ... "all living creatures have the innate learning ability to learn what they need to learn to master their being and to thrive in life"...
Beliefs and Behaviour Patterns are Neural Pathways that have Become Hardened.
As the brain is growing and forming in the young child, with each new experience a new neural pathway is created, and as those experiences are repeated that pathway or sets of pathways get used repeatedly. Thus certain pathways will become ‘well-worn’ or ‘hardened’.
This is necessary, and is how, for example, learning to ride a bike gets to a point where one does not need to think about it. The thinking during repeated training has formed enough of a pathway series to carry out all the various task required to maintain balance, note direction, read the ground and so on. Without having to think about it, whilst retaining the ability to respond to subtle changes.
Learning
In this way the child learns and stores vital skills, such as control of her/his limbs, balance, co-ordination and so on.
We know that it takes about 10,000 hours of training to become competently fluent on say a given musical instrument so that one is a 'virtuoso', (indeed any particular skill/talent) that is then viewed, in our culture, as ‘pretty damn good’.
This applies to physical action as much as thought processes.
We know that children learn much quicker when their learning is self-directed, and that the enthusiasm of the child is a major factor in driving what they will learn.
We know that infants and very young children learn at rapid rate, way beyond what is learned in later life, at university and as ones ‘career’ develops.
It stands to reason that this learning ability is a biological imperative. The child in nature has much to learn, much that is essential for self-reliance and thus survival or as I like to say ‘thrivival’, and not a huge amount of time to do it in. Can it be that natures learning driver is pleasure, or ease or an aura of empathy?
What is obvious to me, and to many others, is this : this mode of learning cannot be improved in any way by any artifice!
Typically indigenous peoples children are fully competent by age 6.
That is to say they are no longer utterly dependent and are considered an asset to their community. It is common for older children to care for the younger children, and there is much learning that is passed from child to child, rather than from adult to child. That adult to child sharing comes later, as the child approaches young adulthood.
To give you an idea of just how much a typical indigenous person will learn, I have seen estimates of a comparison of the botanical knowledge of a rain forest dweller compared to that of a European university trained botanist. The estimate suggests that the indigenous forest dweller contains the equivalent of 35 botanists with 15 years experience each!
That goes way beyond anything we in the West now consider an ‘expert’ or’ virtuoso’. Who is learning what? What is being taught?
Given this amazing learning ability and the imaginal intentional capacity of the natural human being, what are the implications for the natural child in a typical industrial society school environment?
Immediately arises the question of how much time does a child spend in a school environment as opposed to the real world (which is where the natural child’s learning is logically based)?
What does the loss of that real-world learning mean for the natural child being westernised, industrialised?
Given the general tendency within indigenous peoples to respect the unique personal entity, to embrace diversity and independence along side interdependence, what does the current practice of the 'teaching' of ‘belief systems’ imply for the natural child? And what does that imply for society?
The Roots of Modern Compulsory State Education
To answer these questions, in the context of a western styled education, one has to go to the roots of that system and seek out the inspiration for it. John Taylor Gatto has done that in great detail in his phenomenal work, “The Underground History of American Education”. I will give a brief description here, culled from his book.
The initial inspiration for Western Mass Schooling, or Compulsory State Education, came from observations ,by the British Empire in India, of the Hindi Rote System of education devised for the lower classes within the Hindi system. It was an Anglican Military Chaplain who first observed and understood how this system worked. His name was Andrew Bell.
What he saw and understood was that by gathering the children into large groups, where they had to learn drills by rote, where corporal punishment was widely used, where there was a number of powerful external imperatives to show that one had learned, (could repeat the scriptures, perform the rituals, read the texts, understood one's place in Hindi Society, embodied the concepts of class and so on) the Hindi Caste system had created a psychologically solid state and class structure that had endured for thousands of years, and had resisted the British in spite of the British technological superiority in sea faring and in warfare.
Indeed there was meeting of minds in that the elites of both cultures recognised each other, and thus the British Raj, an accommodation of equals, both ruling their respective masses. The older was to refine the younger. And this was driven largely by commercial interests.
The Hindi Class System
An ancient civilisation, one which had propsered peacefully for millenia, The Political Structure of the Hindi Caste system, at the time of the English invasion of India, looked a bit like this :
Top 5% of three groups : in Order of Power : Brahmin's (priests and the professions), Warriors and Administrators, Merchants and Land Cultivators
Lower 95% of two groups : Menials, and Untouchables.
The Brahmin's ensured that the warriors, administrators and the bulk of the leaderships received a diluted insight into the drivers of this system, so that they alone retained overall control.
The lower 95% received the mass schooling, administered by teachers, who drilled student leaders, who then drilled hundreds of students, in groups of ten or so, all of this in large single rooms. The entire operation of each school was directed by a single Brahmin.
And all this because the belief systems were so entrenched by the time the child was 7 or so, ‘hardwired’ if you will, the overall system of the Hindi centralised power was secure.
“The entire purpose of the Hindu (Western Compulsion) Schooling was to preserve the class system.”
At the time there was no formalised education in the British Empire, apart from the few elite schools and colleges. The peasant yeomanry were to a large degree self educated. Home schooled. The recent move from peasant yeomanry to factory and mine worker had transformed the British Empire, though there was stiff resistance to this move, as the yeomanry/peasant came from a background of liberty and dignity. The Luddites were literate and clearly understood the what the coming factory system implied. The loss of their lands via The Enclosure Acts was a coercive move, designed to drive them into factories. Read E E Thompson's fine work "The Making of The English Working Class" for a detailed look at who, how and why this process developed. One of the most striking aspects of this was the way Methodism dove-tailed with the interests of the factory owners in conditioning compliant factory workers to acceptance of their lot as good!
The first expression of this kind of schooling arose from a complete mis-understanding , and can be found in the Lancaster Schools of England. Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker, was inspired by an account written by Bell in 1797 of the Hindi system. Bell had made it clear that such a system was an effective impediment to learning, and created in it’s subjects a docility perfectly suited to mass production labour. Lancaster missed this, and concluded that it would be cheap way to awaken intellect in the lower classes. A classic case of a genuine do-gooder who missed the point completely.
Sparta : The Legend of the 300
The rest as they say is History. The History of Compulsory State Education Systems, … Do not confuse the system with the people on the ground, and their varying motivations. Like all centrally managed industrial processes the Education System depends utterly upon predictability. Predictable processes, predictable results, predictable products. And management ignore the effluent, the waste, they hide it from view, they dump it or they recycle it. They get state subsidies to deal with the waste?
Business psychology. Bullying. Quite not the exciting feel of the 'illuminati' etc etc.... Banal truth.
I would add here that the inspiration for Western Military Training came from the legendary Spartan Culture, and within that the concept of the militarisation of an entire culture was perfected. This was what drove the tiny Prussian State from near collapse, to become one of Europe's most feared fighting machines and thus a mighty Empire. That was where the first 'kindergartens' were crafted. The logic was impeccable. And it was the Prussian system that refined Compulsory State Education as we know it. It was American, French, German and English Coal and Steel Barons, and their paid Educators who were most inspired by the Prussian Military success at Waterloo.
I highly recommend J T Gatto’s work. He unveils much about the history of the project for a world wide state sponsored system of compulsory education for the masses, and it has ever since defined the nature of our society and it’s ills. Gatto's work will both shock and reward the reader many, many times.
Implications
So now that we have looked to the core inspiration, we can ask what are the implications for a natural child in a typical western school environment? Lets take a look at what happens to that child.
1. They are cut off from the real world experience, from the wider community and segregated from their parents.
2. They are forced into un-natural groupings, according to age and ‘ability’ to conform.
3. They are required to ‘learn’ what they are told to learn, which really means to memorise texts provided by the teachers, who have been given these texts by other unseen administrators of the system.
4. Failure to learn leads to punishment.
Early schooling is about learning to respond appropriately to authority. Obedience is inculcated, and becomes hard-wired in the first three years of primary school, as a direct result of' schooling'. Irrespective of how kind theteacher, how colourful the class room, the responses to authority are learned and internalised, and remain throughout the child's 'education' and into adult life. (These days the State wants your children even earlier!)
Thus the child learns that his or her own interests do not matter unless they get approval from the teachers. Their parents, having been through the same process, continue the training at home, unaware of what they are doing, innocently drawn into this process, because they are for the most part unaware of these processes.
Under these circumstances, the child will therefore of course choose an interest to follow within the scope of what is offered, this in order for the psyche to survive, and will become ever more dependent upon external approvals.
The child will have to become devious, self-limiting and reactive to external cue driven stimuli because they are expected to NOT MAKE MISTAKES, (such is the nature of rote learning) and what we know from nature is that making a mistake, observing it and correcting it, (an internal feedback loop) is an essential part of the natural learning process. Once that is disabled, then self motivated learning is all but impossible.
Conditioningand Control
All of this conditions the child in ways that make them ‘ideal’ for working in factories and bureaucracy's. Both are situations that demand a certain 'inhumanity' of the worker or clerk. Boxes must be ticked, time cards stamped, targets met. The stick is the possible loss of one's job... the carrot is 'security'. An ability to shut down key feeling centres is the core ability sought by corporations, military and police forces and bureaucracies.
The childs teachers and the childs parents have all been through and accepted this system, and this further isolates the child, for there is no-one to talk to who understands what is happening.
Those that ‘do not fit in’ or give up are then channelled towards unskilled labour or roles such as the rank and file of the military and the police. The system has a use for all.
And then finally there’s those who rebel, or those who become severely damaged by this system and thus become ‘drop-outs’ , whose chances of getting a ‘good job’ are diminished … they are demonised, and held up as a frightening example to the others.
Of course this process has varying rates of success....
Not everyone is equally effected. Some escape. Officers and Political Leaders, those who do not escape, are most often drawn from the better schools and colleges, or from a carefully screened few who work their way up the ranks, each move up being dependent upon a demonstrable willingness to comply with the directives of the system.
Meaning
In essence this is all about the control of meaning, of replacing inner meaning with received meaning, thus shutting the gate on the possibility of inner meaning arising as a threat to the established meaning. What this means is that the children develop belief systems about their abilities, about their place in society and indeed about their society itself (these beliefs are embedded in the texts of the subjects they are taught/forced to learn in school) by constant repetition. These beliefs become hard wired, neural pathways, and become a sort of ersatz identity, one that is defensive and quite resistant to alteration - held in place by fear.
And that is the nature of belief systems, state and commercial control, in a nut shell. Protest as A Safety Valve
That is why 20 million taxpaying adults will allow a Government to rip them off, time and time again, to send their sons and daughters to war, to manufacture and then drop bombs on other peoples who have been demonised in media and statements by politicians who know the depth of the conditioning, given their role in that conditioning process, all this in spite of a nagging sense that somehow it’s not right!
This is why some people will read one newspaper and others another, and they will sit in a pub, or on a TV panel, or in a Legislative Assembly and debate the issues, repeating what they have read, thinking all the time that their debates are genuinely based upon their own unique understandings and particular viewpoints, rather than share experienced knowledge culled from the wider world and information they have gleaned for themselves so as to enlighten each other. In debates, the winner takes all!
This is why people with strong beliefs are often impervious to anything that counters the basis for or adherence to those beliefs. This is why so many people fail to engage their hearts and minds with the increasingly urgent issues we are all faced with.
This is why the ‘new age’ leads to ideologues, fantasists and sectarian divides, because of this mode of reading and repeating what one has read. Original thinking is all but obliterated, and where it exists, it is limited to ‘invention’, ‘fashion’, ‘art’ and literature and corralled into a world that is carefully structured by this whole process. Thus the majority of people become mere repositories of belief.
TV and Advertising work because of this very fact.
Processed and less than optimum foods don’t help matters either.
A Violent System
What has to be understood is that this system was imposed, is still imposing itself and is inherently violent - as is the nature of the city state and industrialism as we know them. The natural child is robbed of his or her innate sensory acuity, and is practically blinded by this process, made emotionally blind because the child has to suppress his or her natural anger at this imposition in order to survive.
On top of this, parenting practices handed down over the years, from the elites, have made violence an acceptable mode of training. As Alice Miller points out a child who has been beaten or humiliated all the while being told by those they are dependent upon, those whose love they require for their own psychic development,’that this is for your own good’ must believe that admonishment, and will in turn do the same to their own children.
It was in 1998 that corporal punishment was outlawed in English Schools. At the same time, to counter that, increased testing was introduced - and we know that this increased testing has not led to an increased intellectual ability in our children. Schools were driven to meet targets in order to secure funding, and so the teachers role become that of a trainer for testing, rather than an educator. The system is designed so that tinkering with it appears to bring novel change, yet the core underlying dynamics remain in place and the power structures retain their over arching power.
This is what the various mainstream movements for peace, for liberty, for ecologically sound cultures have failed to grasp - that this conditioning permeates our society, creates a mass emotional blindness, and is the basis for all the violence of states, corporations, warlords, wifebeaters, thugs and bullies. and the tacit compliance of ordinary people. And unless unravelling this conditioning process is included in the work of these movements, up front and in yer face, it is unlikely that they will be successful.
The issues are all encapsulated in this : that the adult world manipulates the minds and hearts of children for their desires and wants, irrespective of the inherent, natural and essential psychic needs of the child.
End that condtioning, and much of the violence of states etc will vanish, as people grow up with their empathy intact, as people refuse to comply, refuse to accept the justifications and adverse behaviour of Governments, of the Military Industrial Complex, of the Establishment. End that conditioning, let the children learn as naturally as they can, and they will find the solutions - as Einstein noted "“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”" and "Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death”
Yes we can, and only we can do it!
If all this seems a bit too much or unlikely, than don't take my word for it. Explore the issues I have highlighted, do your own research, check in with your own experiences and inner sensing, and decide for yourself.
A spontaneous perfomance that attempts to frame some of these ideas for an audience
The fundamentals of State Control and the true agenda of Compulsory State Education (schooling) are revealed by the following quotations
Charles Pierce, the eminence grise behind William James and John Dewey, architects of Compulsory State Education in the USA wrote :
“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of the will of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed.
Let all possible cause of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehension. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard … unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence….
Let a list of opinions be drawn up to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”
Woodrow Wilson speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909 :
“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
This is the technology of modern management ……this is the doctrine which drove William James in “Principles of Psychology” (1890), to assign habit-training, not intellectual development, the place of honour in schooling :
“Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what … saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor … it alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive (jobs) from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different strata of society from mixing.”
All of us who attended state schooling have been exposed to and conditioned to accept the imposed and limited ideas that are taught through that education, reinforced through the media and that underpin the success of marketing.
This is the core technology of psychological state control upon which the likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron and the leaders of Indusrty et al depend upon.
Of course they retain that other oh-so familiar stick, that of poverty, physical violence or imprisonment to curtail those few who escape this conditioning. That’s what the War Against Terror and the consistent attack on civil liberties is all about.
Reminding you and I that ‘we are either with us or against us”. And that there are penalties for non-compliance. You will be excluded!
With thanks to John Taylor Gatto, in whose most recent book, "Weapons of Mass Instruction", I found these and other quotes and resources.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com
Gattos book, "An Underground History of American Education" is published on-line at his website. In it he researched the international project to establish Compulsory State Education, from it's roots in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to the 21st Century.
A live take of a set I did at the Conscious Cabaret in Brighton on 16th June 2008!
This one's about John Taylor Gattos expose of the hidden agenda of COMPULSORY STATE EDUCATION...
The chorus line is
"All children are intelligent, All children are beautiful, All children are creators this we know!"
Sing it with gusto!
Mark Hellewell shot the video, I did an edit or two and the good folk of Brighton provided the spiritual support! Bless!
Pass this on, if you please, along with the following :
Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were spending more themselves. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board as they occur in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):
In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
This mission statement will reward multiple rereadings.
