(Note: John Gatto is the former New York State Teacher of
the Year who renounced
the public school system in his landmark book DUMBING US DOWN. He
is
constantly in demand as a public speaker.
As a bit of background, the industrial titans of the 1890's began
to think that not only
could the production line be engineered, but people's lives could
be engineered as well,
in order to work like homogeneous robots with the machines.
People like Rockefeller
and Carnegie gave huge sums to prominent academics to see if this
could be realized
through the educational system. They found that to a considerable
extent this could be
done, and it is still being done. This is the story that John
Gatto has to tell.-DB)
What I intend to talk to you about this afternoon is what I
understand you are aware of -- the
positive goals and values that you seek as homeschoolers. But I
want to talk about the
specifics of what you're fleeing, because what you're fleeing is
alive and well in the green state
of Vermont. Perhaps Vermont is one of a half-a-dozen states that
the U.S. Dept. of
Education uses as testing grounds. I believe they picked Vermont
because they understand
that you people are so reasonable that you're always willing to
negotiate, anyway I have some
information to bring to you on a different outlook on what the
intention of schools is, the title
of this talk is:
A SHORT ANGRY HISTORY OF
AMERICAN FORCED SCHOOLING
Between 1967 and 1974 teacher training in the US was covertly
revamped through the
coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations,
certain universities, global
corporations and several other interests working through the U.S.
Dept. of Education and
through key state education departments, one of which is the
state of Vermont.
Three critical documents in this transformation are Benjamin
Bloom's multivolume
TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES. That was the first. The
second was a
many-state project begun in 1967 called DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR
THE FUTURE,
and it was set forth in an enormous manual of nearly 1000 pages
and finally the
BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT which came in a manual of
over
1000 pages. These were inserted into every state education
department. in the country and
moneys were inserted there to pay faculty salaries a certain
range of bribes for the school
districts that would pioneer the use of these things.
Let me start with the DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE papers.
They were
the collusion with the Federal Education Dept. and the presumably
independent state
agencies. They redefined education after the 19th century
Germanic fashion as a means
(quoting now from the document) "as a means to achieve
important economic and social
goals for the national character" -- and I would hasten to
add that none of those goals
included the maximum development of your son or daughter. State
agencies would henceforth
"act as Federal enforcers insuring compliance of local
schools with Federal directives". The
document proclaimed that ( I'm quoting again), "each state
education department must be an
agent of change", proclaimed further "change must be
institutionalized". I doubt if an account
of this appeared in any newspaper in the state of Vermont or for
that matter any newspaper in
the country (U.S.). Education departments. were, I am quoting a
third time, "to lose their
identity as well as their authority in order to form a
partnership with the Federal Government".
The BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT outlines specific
teaching
reforms to be forced on the country, unwillingly of course, after
1967. It also sets out, in clear
language, the outlook and intent of its invisible creators.
Nothing less than quoting again "the
impersonal manipulation through schooling of a future America in
which few will be able to
maintain control over their own opinions", an America in
which ( quoting again) "each
individual receives at birth, a multipurpose identification
number which enables employers and
other controllers to keep track of their [underlings]",
underlings is my interpretation,
everything else came out of the document, "and to expose
them to the directors subliminal
influence of the state education department and the federal
department acted through those
whenever necessary".
Readers learned in 1967, of course you and I were not among those
readers, that chemical
experimentation on minors would be normal procedure in the post
1967 world. That is a
pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which
would accompany the
student body of the future. Teachers were expected to function as
government change agents
and their trainers, ( this the first time reading this document
that I realized that the expression
"teacher trainer", like animal trainer, is an odd
locution). The teacher trainers were notified
that behavioral science would henceforth replace academic
curriculum in schools. The project
identified the future as one ( again I'm quoting) "in which
a small league would control all
important matters, one in which participatory democracy would
largely disappear". Children
would be made to see that their classmates, and indeed the
average man or woman were so
inadequate, were so irresponsible that they had to be controlled
and regulated. The
tremendous rise in school violence and general chaos in the late
1960's, a period when
teachers and schools across the land were stripped of their
ability to discipline children, might
be seen as a convenient public justification for sharp
constrictions of traditional liberty. Each
outburst resonated through the press like a billboard for
emergency measures.
According to the BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT, post
modern
schooling would focus, I quote directly from the document,
"on pleasure cultivation and
interpersonal relationships and other attitudes and skills
compatible with a non-work world".
It makes sense of course doesn't it? That irresponsible
semi-illiterate people could not be
trusted with much responsibility so in the new change agentry
schooling, which is called for by
this national teacher training document, the teacher is a
therapist, translating the prescriptions
of the social psychologists into practical action research in the
classroom.
The third critical gospel signaling a great transformation was at
hand, to those in the know,
was Bloom's TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES, which has since
its
publication, spawned a number of descendant forms, like mastery
learning, outcomes based
educations and school to work business-government-economic
projects. Dr. Bloom's
compilation was a tool, I'm quoting from Dr. Bloom, "a tool
to classify the ways individuals
are to act, think or feel is the result of participating in some
unit of instruction". I would be
dubious if any parent in the U.S. would send their children to
schools under these auspices if
they were thinking people. In this fashion, children would learn
proper attitudes and have their
improper attitudes (brought from home) remediated. In all stages
of the school manipulations
testing would be essential to locate the child's mind on a
official continuum.
<snip>
The complete speech is at http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm
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