Some Adverse Effects of Compulsory Schooling.

The real danger in 'schooling' is in how the child's mind is slowly altered such that schooling appears normal, and as parents these children will send their children to school as if it were natural, normal. Thus patterns of obedience, hierarchical acceptance, peer pressure and bullying endure over generations. These all destroy community. 

This normalisation is neurological and physiological as much as it is psychological. The child's neurology and physicality slowly 'adapts' to the environment of schooling (a natural enough process, it's part of growing and knowing the world through the body as a total sensory entity - yet the schooling environment lacks key experiential learnings related to embodied self knowledge, and this distorts all who pass through it to greater or lessor degree -)

In seeking to address this distortion, regaining a trust of embodied self knowledge and self empathy is vital. 

 That process cannot be predicted, medicalised, therapeuted. 

It cannot be packaged, sold nor can it become an ideological end. 

It can be supported, mostly by honesty, healthful diet, good friends, closeness with nature, and it is truly a process that is the natural base of healthy community - a community that knows itself.

There are many people who assert that humanity is threatened not least by a 'herd' mentality, a 'primitive instinct' that wants to follow, to 'fit in', which has no place in a superior individualistic world-view. 

Well, this is much less a matter of natural instinct, and much more a matter of conditioning. a matter of the distortion of our innate biological mandate towards empathic self awareness; and with that, empathy as a perceptive ability.

Trauma related behaviours such as poverty, war, schooling, marketing, religious indoctrination, ideological indoctrination are all exercised in the most part through the agency of Institutional Power....

The matter is too important to future generations, let alone those who live today, for it to be treated with any degree of flippancy, outside of using comedy to sweeten a rather bitter pill... the pill of truth.

'Herding'  as the term is used most often, is not a human 'instinct' - it is a LEARNED behaviour...it is pure scientific flippancy to assert otherwise.

It is also a a term when used too often is one that dehumanises people, and this inevitably leads to a dulling of any sense of empathy, which itself feeds the system of Power.

It's not surprising so many do feel this way, that there's a human 'instinct' that is problematic since it's what the Christian nations have been telling themselves for thousands of years..  "You must beat the devil out of the child to save the child for God."

It takes time for such a corrosive pathology to heal. It takes, above all, honesty. Scientific honesty. It's time that all 'schooling' be made subject to some Scientific Honesty.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

The Corruption of The Curriculum.

I read this rather clear and yet short piece, on the 'corruption of the curriculum' and it's a damning indictment of Educational policy and tinkering with teaching practice, learning 'styles' and course content.

It states the following :

 "The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students."

The article then outlines in concise language some of the 'corruptions' and their adverse effects.

The describe 'educational apartheid' (subjects excluded for some students based on income and class), 'history without dates' (without a coherent narrative), a policy of behavioural change that reduces

It's well worth a read, and I would like to put it in context, "join-the-dots" so to speak. To go further. To clarify.

After all, it was issued by Civitas, who are pretty much a right wing think tank, and why would I be impressed by what ever spewed forth from such an establishment. So I gotta put that right. I am not at all impressed, because the article itself is tinkering, and while it makes a critique that has some substance, it fails (as intended) to set things in context.

Has anyone mentioned to you that it is known, and proven, that State Education was initially instigated by intensive and long-term lobbying from business? 

"Perhaps the greatest of school's illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families—to level the playing field, so to speak."

It was of course,  presented as philanthropy,  the trojan horse of modern social engineering effected by the use of wealth, by stealth. And yes some people really did believe they were genuine seeking to help others and to help 'mankind'.

In fact there was close to a century of lobbying at  local, national and international levels of Industrial Society, and a huge, vast amount of money was spent over that time in this project to introduce Compulsion Schooling for all children.

"The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

	Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...
	Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...

The primary driver was of this project was the power and control of business, mostly the coal business, which with coal being the first fossil fuel, has a certain resonance with corporate power play within Governance by the petroleum industry. that we know today ... the coal and steel business was or became the central power in 'Civilisation' and one of the most aggressive in terms of 'expansion' (globalisation) and in terms of infiltrating Governance. The project to compel all children into education started in the 1750s.

And what has happened is that for a while it worked, as all training does, then some people started to see through the system, and found ways to use it as the basis for real learning outside the system, and began to resist the indoctrination and worse, actively self organise.

Power cannot allow that. For two reasons.

!. To many power players is dangerous if they are all equals.  There has to be manageable limits.

2. "If some 'poor' people learn to do what we are doing, we are out of business. So let us 'educate' them such that they cannot really learn, but can remember what they have been told, and they'll confuse memorising for learning. And we will set the psychological limit within the education SYSTEM, the systemic process does the work, not merely the curriculum."

The curriculum can be tinkered with, both by Power and by those Power allows, within limits and under their watchful eyes.

The article I quoted is complaining about the tinkering, and not the system. It prefers the 'traditional tinkering'. That's as far as it goes.

Not impressive.

The SYSTEM must  remain, even as it's façade is ever changing as either genuine empathic understanding emerges (they can't fool all the people all of the time) which Power will always seek to co-opt, by systematising whatever emerges organically, thus neutering any potential threat to Power it might represent.

Any right winger knows this. Well,the ones who dictate policy. Who ever they are..

This is partly why John Taylor Gatto says we must disestablish the SYSTEM, retaining the infrastructure and applying and modifying those infrastructure so that they can be used as places of self motivated learning, where the full person is allowed to grow, as such to truly meet the needs of the children, and indeed of all of us, as natural learners.

"After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

Self motivated, self organised. Self Governing. Common Sense. Biologically mandated.

The article is a brief overview of a book, by Frank Furedi...

'The Corruption of the Curriculum' by Frank Furedi, Shirley Lawes, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, David Perks and Alex Standish is published by Civitas, 77 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 2EZ

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE - I KNOW WHO I AM

Recently I did a spontaneous spoken word/poetry performance piece, entitled (after the fact) "I KNOW WHO I AM!" which worked through the issue of self awareness and self knowledge.

The basic idea is that by imposing external concepts upon a child's mind, and heart and by conditioning through schooling, the child is alienated from his or her true sense of self, and that is the basis for control by others. The implication is that as a new born baby "I KNEW WHO I WAS".... as we all do.

Read this and understand that the workings of the Education System, Corporations, Media and Government are predicated upon the direction of children away from themselves!

-------------------------------------------------

William Torrey Harris

..........it's time for you to meet William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. No one, other than Cubberley, who rose out of the ranks of professional pedagogues ever had as much influence as Harris. Harris both standardized and Germanized our schools. Listen to his voice from The Philosophy of Education, published in1906:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
–The Philosphy of Education (1906)

Listen to Harris again, giant of American schooling, leading scholar of German philosophy in the Western hemisphere, editor and publisher of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy which trained a generation of American intellectuals in the ideas of the Prussian thinkers Kant and Hegel, the man who gave America scientifically age-graded classrooms to replace successful mixed-age school practice. Again, from The Philosophy of Education, Harris sets forth his gloomy vision:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
–The Philosphy of Education (1906)

Nearly a hundred years ago, this schoolman thought self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. Surely he was right. When you stand at a machine or sit at a computer you need an ability to withdraw from life, to alienate yourself without a supervisor. How else could that be tolerated unless prepared in advance by simulated Birkenhead drills? School, thought Harris, was sensible preparation for a life of alienation. Can you say he was wrong?

from : http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/5k.htm

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A child who is unaware of this process, will have suppressed that true sense of self, and replaced it with a persona that the society and parents will have, in one way or another, indicated to the child what ideal role to adopt, and the child will of course evolve her or his own adaption to that role. That child will all the more easily do the same to his or her own children, and of course, rationalise the whole thing as being for the child's own good!

Yet within, the true self is looking for ways to live, and this creates a series of tensions within the individual.... tensions that can be temporarily assuaged by addiction, hobbies, religion, ideologies, compulsive behaviours, achievements and so on.

The only way to resolve this issue is to get to the core true self, and to then live that self. And the only way to do that, is through ruthless self honesty.... no external will replace that quality, no drug, no cosmic vibration, no guru, no yoga , no self-help book will do that work.... and certainly no psychiatrist or psychologist will do that work for another, for they can only do it for themselves, and having done so, can only, at the very best, be an enlightened witness and supportive companion for another who wants help in this area. And this is rarely the case.

For me, the knowledge that I KNEW WHO I WAS as a child led me to the understanding that who I am is a lot about what I honestly feel about the way things are being done around me - I either like them or I do not, they either work for me or they do not, there is no confusion, just a clarity

We know that the heart is a cognitive, sentient and intelligent organ, that it contains a brain and is linked to the main head brain by direct neurons, single cells connecting them both. We know the heart will sense and observe aspects of the world around before the eye/brain cognition kicks in.

Visit www.heartmath.org to learn more about the heart brain intelligence.

We know that in great literature, and in the popular arts alike that the heart is portrayed as emotional, non-rational and is to a degree sentimentalised. And that directs the cognitive functions away from the heart to the brain, mind which is heavily conditioned as outlined above.

We need our heart intelligence because it is closer to our true self, and that as a bulwark against bullhsit we get the rationalised world of ideological economics, wars, pollution dumping and priestly paedophilia!

Is it not time to unveil the greatest taboo in our society? We are conditioned, and have been conditioned to comply with the abuse of our own children and then rationalise it as being for their own good so they can get a job and prosper! And then extreme cases of abuse are held up on the media to allow a scapegoating that lets the State and it's sponsors off scott free!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe