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posted by amanda on Jun 8

In case you just crawled out from under your rock
ABC News: Senate Rejects Amendment on Gay Marriage

My recent reading of Dumbing Us Down has really shaped my thoughts on this ban. The whole book has changed the way that I look at legislation, but the last chapter was what really made me start thinking.

As I shared yesterday, Gatto asserts that when you order change in behavior then what actually happens it that people appear to change and yet they harbor a huge amount of resentment and end up exacting vengence in a way far worse than if you had allowed the community to change outside of legislation. He backs this up with data about racism, patriarchy, drug use, and alcoholism.

I was thinking back on his theory today as my dh and I talked about the gay marriage ban, and I couldn’t help but agree with Mr. Gatto. Any way that I played out the scenario, it still wouldn’t really accomplish its set “goal”.

So here are my thoughts. I am assuming one big thing here: that it is almost exclusively (or at least a majority of) Christians who are in favor of this ban. My responses are what I would say to any fellow Christian.

1. If the ban were to pass and gay marriage was banned.
Would anything really change? Gay families would still be living together. The sin would still be happening. Even if the ban were somehow able to stop homosexual behavior (which is pretty ridiculous to even assume) then it is still a “bass-ackwards” way to solve the problem of sin. How many times do Christians tell people that they don’t need to be perfect to come to Christ? How many times are we told in the Bible that we can’t expect people of the world to live sinless lives? We all need God’s grace, and we are given it “while we were still sinners.” The change in life comes after salvation, not before.

What about Christians who are homosexual and would wish to get married?
I don’t think this would change anything either. As the band Hangnail says in their song “No Name Yet” (a song about abortion, btw)

Those man-made laws don’t mean a thing

It doesn’t matter what man says - what matters is what God says. If Christians are already choosing to sin in this area, do you think a man made law will change it?

2. If the ban doesn’t pass
Is marriage really threatened because there isn’t a ban on gay marriage? If you want to protect marriage, maybe we should have a ban on living together. Maybe a ban on sex outside of marriage would help. Some Christians would probably like a ban on hand holding. That leads to sex… don’t you know?

So really I think this ban is irrelevant no matter what eventually happens. We can’t change people’s hearts by force, and if we want to ban sins, then we’ve got a long list to get going on…

posted by amanda on Jun 6

Well, we’ve made it to the final chapter in Dumbing Us Down, and I have really enjoyed this book I really encourage everyone to read it!

So let’s dive in, shall we? It seems like this chapter has come up in most of my conversations this week. It really is excellent.

Gatto starts the chapter by exploring a bit of a case study into the Colonial New England town of Dedham. He talks about the church there and how rigid they were when they first started. In town, only Congregationalists were welcome, and anyone else risked being “shunned, persecuted, or even burned at the stake”. He tells stories of Unitarians being treated like invaders when they came through the city. Needless to say, Dedham was not a place that welcomed new thoughts and ideas.

Even though this seems like a sea of conformity, Gatto shows how, ironically, their way of life actually demanded individuality. Their church services were free of liturgy, and emphasized local preaching on local issues. This means that there was a constant struggle as each person acted as their own priest and expert. This leads to a “progress toward truth.” This is also called “the dialectic.”

Central planners of any period despise the dialectic because it gets in the way of efficiently broadcasting “one right way” to do things. Half a century ago Bertrand Russell remarked that the United States was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided teaching its children to think dialectically. He was talking about twentieth-century America, of course, the land of compulsory government schooling, not the New England of Congregational distinction… Roger Williams saw as clearly as any person of his time and recognized the inevitable connection between dissonance and quality of life. You can’t have one without the other.

Gatto is not referring to discipline here, but this topic came up in our “Young Parents” Bible study that we lead. We are going through Families Where Grace is in Place, and we came upon the part where VanVonderen addresses how part of what 2-year-olds have to learn is to disagree. Some parents feel that their children should never say “no”, never disagree, and only blindly accept, but that doesn’t teach children to grow up and make responsible decisions for themselves. That only raises robots who are paralyzed when they come to a decision point. You have to let your children practice in a safe environment where its ok to make mistakes. That will enable them to succeed once they are out in the real world.

But, back to Gatto’s point…. Each city in Colonial New England was able to set their own rules and there was no “one right way” of doing things. Some cities worked like a commune and shared their work, while others favored private ownership and individual choice. This allowed cities to work as they wished, and allowed for creativity and individual choice as opposed to forced compliance.

Something else that was special about those Colonial towns:

I think it hides a secret of great power, which social engineers who built and maintain our government monopoly schools are forced to overlook: Each town was able to exclude people it didn’t like! People were able to choose whom they wanted to work with, to sort themselves into a living curriculum that worked for them. The words of the first Dedham charter catch this feeling perfectly; the original settlers wanted to (and did) shut out “people whose dispositions do not suit us, whose very society will be hurtful to us.”

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of the politically correct culture, eh?

…these early towns functioned like selective clubs… narrowing human differences down to a range that could be managed by them humanely. If you consider the tremendous stresses the dialectical process sets up anyway — where all people are their own priests, their own final masters — it’s hard to see how a congregational society can do otherwise. If you have to accept everyone, no matter how hostile they may be to your own personality, philosophy, or mission, then an oganization would quickly become paralyzed by fatal disagreement.

The point is that there is not one perfect choice for everyone. Every town didn’t fit every person’s needs, so they needed to find a new town. The Greeks had a story about a man who tried to make everyone uniform

…his name was Procustes. He cut or stretched travellers to fit his guest bed. The system worked perfectly, but it played havoc with the traveller.

So the Greeks understood what we cannot.

These New Englanders invented a system where people who wanted to live and work together could do so… It was almost as if by taking care of your own business you succeeded in some magical fashion in taking care of public business too…

This catches a piece of what’s wrong with compulsory schools as large as New England towns, schools that don’t allow any choice of curricula, philosophy, or companions.

Its not that those were perfect times though. The citizens of Dedham whipped Quaker women out of town and did the same to Presbyterians. They were not exactly model citizens… And yet, Massachusetts has gone from being some of the most intolerant people in our nation’s history to being the most liberal state in the Union. So how did they manage to teach themselves to reform without government intervention? What made them change?

Something mysterious inside the structure of Congregationalism worked to have them abandon some of the exclusivity that adherence to Biblical elite dogma had taught them.
I am certain that “something” was nearly unconditional local choice. And it was self-correcting! Because the town churches did not team up to present an institutional orthodoxy that made each town just like another — as government monopoly schools do today — error in one church could be countered by its correction in another. As long as people had the choice to vote with their feet, the free market pushed severe errors by leaving a congregation empty, just as it could reward a good place by filling it up.

My friend was telling me the other day about a blog post that she read that addressed a similar issue. It was talking about choice on both ends. It describes a ridiculous scenario where you would be forced to grocery shop in a certain store based on your home location. The grocery store would not compete because it already had your business. They would stop stocking the shelves and soon you’d have to lie and cheat to find a grocery store that was satisfactory. This is the same idea that Gatto is presenting in this chapter.

But maybe you feel it takes too long for people to naturally correct, so we need to force it. Does forcing it really work?

…things legislated out of existence, like alcohol and drug abuse or racism, don’t seem to go away as religious exclusivity went away naturally in New England under a regime of local choice; instead, law appears to give bad habits an injection of virulent new life…

He then talks about the changes that have come around since the “women’s revolution”

…if sharply accelerated rates of suicide, heart disease, emotional illness, sterility, and other pathological conditions are an indicator, the admission of women en masse to the unisex workplace is not an unmixed blessing. Further, some disturbing evidence exists that the income of working couples in 1990 has only slightly more purchasing power than the income of the average working man did in 1910. In effect, two laborers are now being purchased for the price of one — an outcome Adam Smith or David Ricardo might have predicted. And an unseen social cost of all of this has been the destruction of family life, the loss of home as sanctuary or haven, and the bewilderment of children who, since infancy, have been raised by strangers.

Whoa. I’ll have to research that one and get back to you

Still, the point exists that Dedham changed without legislation.

But if they had been ordered to change, ordered, as other immmigrants were, to change their behavior and to abandon their culture to compulsory schools set up for that purpose, I think what would have happened is this: some of them would have seemed to change but would have harbored such powerful resentments at being deprived of choice that some way to exact vegence would have evolved.

OK, now I see where he was going with his examples of women (he also talks about “Black Americans” (as he says it) and drug policies…) He’s saying that if you force people to change, then they end up resentful and passive aggressively choosing the old way. Interesting.

Back to the free market in education though

By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling — teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, and others — has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.

We have no choice of schools. Gatto believes that our students are simply waiting to be fed. We need people to tell us every step of the way what should be done. We, on a whole, have problems doing tasks with creativity and instead wait for instructions.

I think we’ve all seen on tv when students are asked simple questions and they can’t answer them, but apparently this is not a new issue.

… in 1951, a survey made of 30,000 Los Angeles school children discovered that seventy-five percent of eighth graders couldn’t find the Atlantic Ocean on a map and most of them couldn’t calculate fifty percent of thirty-six. From my personal experiences, I stand witness that the situation is certainly not better today.

Yowsa. My 4 year old can find it on a globe

So Gatto wraps up the book and the chapter by suggesting several things:

1. Turn your back on national solutions and toward communities of families… Turn inward until we master “knowing thyself.”
2. Encourage and underwrite experimentation; trust children and families to know what is best for themselves; stop the segregation of children and the aged in walled compounds; involve everyone in every community in the education of the young: businesses, institutions, old people, whole families
3. Don’t be panicked by scare tactics into surrendering your children to experts. There is abundant evidence that less than a hundred hours is sufficient for a person to become totally literate and a self-teacher.
4. Give tax money back to families and let them choose their schools. Allow a free-market model to exist. Far better ideas will come out of a free market than could ever come from an institution

So, in the end, I really enjoyed this book. Thanks for kinda sorta reading along with me It helped to work through my feelings this way!

posted by amanda on Jun 6

Florida Requires Majors in High School - New York Times

Hmmm, I’m not sure what I think of this.

In light of my John Taylor Gatto readings, I can see both good and bad.

The good: It is a step towards remomving the “one right way” path that students must currently travel. It would allow students to customize their education and study things that they enjoy.

It almost seems a little closer to the tradesman model. Where you could start focusing a little earlier.

The bad: Most college students can’t even pick and keep a major during their 4 years, so how can a 13 year old be expected to choose one as she enters high school? My career expectations at 13 were quite different from what they are now.

Could colleges start to look at high school majors and expect (or offer priority to) students who had selected the same major for both high school and college. Would it be more difficult to change your career path as you started college?

So… what do you think?

posted by amanda on Jun 5

Picking up where I left off…

So if grades don’t equal money, and the school is only protecting itself, then what is the purpose of mass schooling? Mr. Gatto has some ideas

Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit — and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time.

True.

Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn’t any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as “low-class” material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff!

Uh, yeah, it really doesn’t make sense when you put it that way, does it? Are we really that materialistic? Well, yeah… probably.

So what is education?

Discovering meaining for yourself as well as discovering satisfying purpose for yourself, is a big part of what education is. How this can be done by locking children away from the world is beyond me.

I mentioned The Purpose Driven Life in a recent post, and the above quote really struck me for this reason. Perhaps if we were able to explore and learn the things about ourselves when we were younger, then we wouldn’t have to have someone spoon-feed it to us through a book… y’think?

Do we need networks in order to accomplish complex tasks? Are they just a neccessary evil?

The Cathedral of Rheims is the best evidence I know of what a community can do and what we stand to lose when we don’t know the difference between these human miracles and the social machinery we call “networks.” Rheims was built without power tools by people working day and night for a hundred years. Everybody worked willingly; nobody was slave labor. No school taught cathedral building as a subject.

So what possessed these people to build this cathedral? How was it done without brute force?

We know the workers were profoundly united as families and as friends, and as friends they knew what they really wanted in the way of a church. Popes and archbishops had nothing to do with it. Gothic architecture itself was invented out of sheer aspiration — the Gothic cathedral stands like a lighthouse illuminating what is possible in the way of uncoerced human union.

Very interesting indeed. So we could do that again? That’s tough to imagine.

And yet, despite examples like this throughout history where mankind accomplished far more amazing things without being forced to do it, there is a push in our society to extend the reach of schools.

Schools, I hear it argued, would make better sense and be a better value as nine-to-five operations or even nine-to-nine ones, working year-round. We’re not a farming community anymore, I hear, that we need to give kids time off to tend the crops. This new-world-order schooling would serve dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, and a whole range of other services, which would convert the institution into a true synthetic community for children, better than the original one for many poor kids, it is said…

Yep, I’ve heard that one too. But that would only cause weaker families, not fix them!

…they blame the family for its failure to be a family. It’s like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.

Hmm, it is indeed.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist

Oooh, yes. I like that! I love non-conformists And, again, what is our goal here?

The heart of a defense for the cherished American ideals of privacy, variety, and individuality lies in the way we bring up our young. Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet, and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

Ouch. True. Although it sounds like an exagerration, but I think we’ve all lived at least one of those examples.

Yet he points out that families, individuality, and community are never about “one-right-way” thinking on a grand scale. Private time is essential for a private identity to develop. We don’t want everyone to think the same and feel so black-and-white about life. Sure, there are things that are non-negotiable, but much of life is lived in the gray areas.

Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation. The schools… can’t work to teach nonmaterial values… because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination have no connection with education; they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not of freedom.

Yes. I was required to volunteer in order to graduate both high school and to advance in college, and it did not teach me those nonmaterial values. I learned them at home. The forced volunteerism was not from the heart nor a true lesson.

Sixty-five years ago Bertrand Russell… saw that mass schooling in the United States had a profoundly anti-democratic intent, that it was a scheme to artifically deliver national unity by eliminating human variation and by eliminating the forge that produces variation: the family. According to Lord Russell, mass schooling produced a recognizably American student: anti-intellectual, superstitious, lacking self-confidence, and having less of what Russell called “inner freedom” than his or her counterpart in any other nation he knew of, past or present… These children became citizens… with a thin “mass character,” holding excellence and aesthetics equally in contempt, being inadequate to the personal crisis of their lives.

Mr. Russell, who was a close relation to the King of England, pointed out something that was said to me when I was overseas. I was often told that Americans walked different, stood different, and could be identified before we even opened our mouths. They felt that Americans looked more confident, but Mr. Russell recognized that this is just a fascade.

So how do we solve this problem? Mr. Gatto’s solution is not to do away with schools, but to change the system. I hope you enjoy my future discussion of the last chapter. I hope to finish it today or tomorrow

posted by amanda on Jun 5

I just finished Dumbing Us Down, and I am hoping to get the rest of my commentary up today so that I can return the book to the library and allow someone else to learn from it

Chapter 4 addresses the current trend towards solving school problems with more school. Good stuff.

Much of the chapter compares and contrasts networks and communities. He says that Aristotle spoke of the differences by saying:

…that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human… What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all judgment is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of one’s own volition

Therefore, a true community is when there is a collection of real families who perform acts of participation. They are participating, but not functioning in narrow parts. They are fully human.

By contrast

Networks, however, don’t require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If… you function in a network, it asks you to supress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part… In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the purpose of some limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity

So then, by definition, schools, corporations, colleges, armies, hospitals, etc. are not real communities. They are networks. He proves part of this by the fact that we don’t forget people who are our familiy, and yet how many have experienced

Even with college dorm “communities,” those most engaging and intimate simulations of community imaginable, who among us has not experienced the awful realization after graduation that we cannot remember our friends’ names or faces very well? Or who, if we can remember, feels much desire to renew those associations?

So he goes on to say that even though it is not fully understood yet, the “caring” in networks is somehow feigned. Its not due to malicious intent, but it happens. Another common place for it to happen is in sports teams, where you can experience a high and a closeness together, and then never be close again.

Since we’ve now established the differences between community and networks, we can see why more of a network will not fill our needs. Children (and all of us) need more real connections, we need to be used and appreciated for our whole, not just a part. Although networks will efficiently meet their end goals, they will not meet our needs for connection and meaning. They will leave us feeling empty.

Schools limit the use of the full human by isolating people based on age and ability. This means that the whole person is not used or valued. They are just stuck in a slot.

If performance within these narrow confines is conceived to be the supreme measure of success, if for instance, an A average is considered the central purpose of adolescent life — the requirements for which to take the most time and attention of the aspirant — and if the worth of thie individual is reckoned by victory or defeat in this abstract pursuit, then a social machine has been constructed which, by attaching purpose and meaning to essentially meaningless and fantastic behavior, will certainly dehumanize students, alienate them from their own human nature, and break the natural connection between them and their parents, to whom they would otherwise look for signification affirmations.

Wow. Yes. How did I get sucked into believing this? When my son was born, I immediately started thinking of how smart he was, how well he’d fit into this “meaningless and fantastic behavior” and how he would not be a “failure” because he could certainly get many A’s! Perhaps more than any of his peers! So what?! What does that teach him about life? Where does the value lie?

Just months before my son was born, I had gone through a real slump upon leaving the workforce and leaving college. My whole life worth had been built upon “successes” like straight-As, skipping a grade, starting college at 14, regular promotions at work, working 3 jobs at a time, and when I no longer had those external measures of my worth, my self-value plummeted. I felt useless. I felt unworthy. I felt like no one noticed I was special anymore, and therefore I wasn’t. If only I had known that the reason I felt this way was because I had been trained to feel that way. Its only natural that I felt that way. Natural, but sad.

Just as we have left behind real community for networks in our education and work, we’re even leaving it behind in our neighborhoods.

…”Community in cities and suburbs is a thin illusion, confined to simulated events like street festivals. If you have moved from one neighborhood to another or from one suburb to another and have quickly forgotten the friends you left behind, then you will have experienced the phenomenon I refer to.

Yes. I have felt that. I am feeling it right now. We are in the process of selling our home and buying a new one, and much of what I want from a future neighborhood is a real community. A community where the whole of the person is used. Not just an artificial community where staged events make us appear close. This is nearly impossible to find.

And so why do schools exist if they are not teaching adequately and are not forming real communities?

Nearly a century ago a French sociologist wrote that every instution’s unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has normally staked out for itself.

Of course. This was lesson #1 in my Operational Management class last semester.

It was this philistine potential — that teaching the young for pay would inevitable expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students — that made Socrates condemn the Sophists so strongly long ago in ancient Greece.

We’ve all heard the stories of teachers who can’t be fired… My mom is a teacher, and she’s told me dozens of stories like this. Back when I was in high school, our assistant principal was found engaging in s*xual activities with young men in a public bathroom. He was arrested. Rather than being fired, he was just relocated though, because he was under contract of the union and couldn’t be fired. The children were not protected… he was.

So if schools aren’t looking out for students first, are they at least preparing them for their lives (even secondarily?). We have long been told that…

…Good education = good job, good money, good things. This has become the universal national banner, hoisted by Harvards as well as high schools… Interestingly enough, the American Federation of Teachers identifies one of its main missions as persuading the business community to hire and promote on the basis of school grades so that the grades = money formula will obtain, just as it was made to obtain for medicine and law after years of political lobbying. So far, the common sense of businesspeople has kept them hiring and promoting the old-fashioned way, using performance and private judgment as the preferred measures…

My dh and I were talking about this the other day, because for the past 8-10 years, there has been a huge boom in certifications for tech jobs. Since we both work in the tech industry, this matters to us. The problem with hiring someone who is certified is that you end up getting someone who knows all the right book answers, but can’t figure out the problems in real life. Even though I’m a Mac girl, I was forced in a previous job to go through the MCSE certification classes. I learned tons about the way that Microsoft expects Windows servers to work. The only little problem is that they don’t work that way at all The training was useless.

Now certifications are losing their importance again. The market is correcting itself. How did I realize that certifications were useless and yet I still thought that traditional compulsory schooling was fabulous?

Well, this one is getting super long, so I’m going to go make a PBJ and come back and finish the chapter as a “Part 2″ post Happy reading!

posted by amanda on May 22

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!

posted by amanda on May 17

Upon Crystal’s suggestion, I decided to check out one of John Taylor Gatto’s books from the library. I did no research, and simply picked what was in stock, so I have been reading Dumbing Us Down. I’m only in the second chapter, so I can’t really make a huge statement yet, but I wanted to blog about this quote

This great crisis that we witness in our schools is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present.

This is such an interesting idea to ponder. I have long been annoyed with our country’s obsession with a very narrow age range: usually around 16-25. It sometimes seems like anyone younger than that age is trying to act older, while those that are older try to act younger.

I had never considered the fact that it does give us a “continuous present” though. What does this do to our country? I think the obvious problem that would arise is that we won’t properly equip the future generation and we won’t learn from the mistakes of past ones. That’s a sad thought.

Children are not valued. Children are not listened to. Children are not treated as they should be - as persons. They are penned up, pushed away, and supposed to fade into the background, and suppress their feelings.

At the same time, the elderly are shipped off and ignored. They are not revered in our culture. Few want to be old. Millions (billions?) are spent each year to make people look younger so that they can run away from the fear of feeling “old”.

This attitude will impact my children. It has already impacted me. I do not want my kids to feel that they need to grow up too soon and I don’t want to act like I am younger because the culture values that (even though I am only 25, so I realize that shouldn’t be much of an issue right now).

This has given me much to meditate upon tonight