The psychopathic school
I wasn’t sure what I’d think of Dumbing Us Down after the first chapter, but he’s really kicking up now!
So, here’s my highlights from chapter 2 - The Psychopathic School - and a few of my comments 
I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civic classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders…. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
I guess I had never really thought about it, but if you asked me whether or not poets learn their craft through English class… I’d have to say “no”. When I think of my gifts and talents, none of them were made in school. Some were enhanced in school, but school didn’t teach me any of those things.
I guess I’m kind of shocked that I don’t find that fact shocking. Isn’t that what schools are for? Why do I accept that schools are irrelevant in this area?
Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literact rate was ninety-eight percent and that after it the figure never ecxeeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.
I had to look this up (of course) and it is legitimate. You can read more about it if you wish, but the interesting thing is that I had no idea that this was the case. Earlier in his book, Mr. Gatto mentions that literacy levels for non-slaves during the American Revolution was close to 100%. He also says that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000 with 20% of them slaves and 50% indentured servants. Pretty impressive. Most adults now couldn’t or wouldn’t read it.
So how can this be? I have long been taught that before there was compulsory schooling, people were highly uneducated. All they knew how to do was farm and clean. They couldn’t read, think, or reason. They did the lowest of jobs and lived the simplest of lives. Actually, more of them read than can read now…
Mr. Gatto then discusses the hours that his students spend in various activities each week. They have 168 total hours, 56 of which they sleep, 55 is spent watching tv, 45 hours at school and getting ready for school, and 3 hours in family meals, which leaves them 9 whole hours to fashion themselves. Very interesting. I just attended a lecture on this same topic of how children spend their time.
So once he’s pointed out that those few hours are left, he says that most of them are probably spent in lessons that the child’s parents select for them.
…these activities are just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existance. It’s a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television, and lessons have a lot to do with it.
Looking back, we watched very little tv and we spent a lot of time entertaining ourselves by creating and inventing. It wasn’t until I started reading and learning about education that I realized that this is a big part of what is missing in children’s lives today. I am so thankful that my parents knew better!
The “Curriculum of Family” is at the heart of any good life. We’ve gotten away from that curriculum - it’s time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds.
I like where he is going with this. Its not anti-school, but its not pro-the-current-system 
I’m looking forward to reading more!