Re: [Phys-l] Have I been excommunicated?

[Bernard Cleyet <bernardcleyet@redshift.com>]

Mark!

This is the one I remember not "appearing", with subject:  PLUS CA 
CHANGE, PLUS C'EST LA MÊME CHOSE

[I add:  E. Crankshaw in Khrushchev's Russia pointed out that the Soviet 
Union was stagnating because of just the same reason as described 
below.  Conformity and regimentation were fine for defeating the 
Germans, but not for making a modern society.]



Test of the new UTF-8 conformity. (Just kidding.)



THE TRUE HISTORY OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

MEMORY HOLE - John Taylor Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of
the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in
1991. But he became disillusioned with schools - the way they enforce
conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness,
and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So
he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's
educational system.

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about
the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that
was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to
comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The
committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the
principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among
the laboring classes." By the turn of the century, America's new
educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and
it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey
wrote in 1897:

"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the
maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right
social growth."

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood
Cubberly - the future Dean of Education at Stanford - wrote that
schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to
be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like
nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from
government and industry."

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board - which funded the
creation of numerous public schools-issued a statement which read in part:

"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.

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education
from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

"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."

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:

"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."

Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these
sentiments in a speech to businessmen:

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class,
a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a
liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult
manual tasks."

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H.
Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government
schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant
wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying
educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and
the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly
wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by
teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could
think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate
articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin
slice of the population-mainly the children of the captains of
industry and government-to rise to the level where they could continue
running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling
system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the
true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're
apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist
Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

"I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old
boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that
perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His
teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They
told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for
the work world. . . that the children have to get used to not being
stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world.'"

http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm


bc

p.s. 7 KB according to Netscape

I certtainly in favour of allowing jpeg, etc. with a low limit, e.g. 25Kfff

Mark O. Kimball wrote:

> > Maybe one must reauthorize (set preference)
> >
> > I find not all my posts appear, also.
> >    
>
> No, you don't need to reauthorize.
>
> A portion of your messages was discarded due to the inclusion of a .jpg
> attachment within the body of the text.
>
> If the list decides the benefit of including pictures out weighs the
> additional mail traffic, new messages with .jpg or other non-text
> additions would appear.
>
> Mark
> --
> Mark O. Kimball
> Gasparinilab, University at Buffalo  |  Low temp physics
> mok2@physics.buffalo.edu  |  URL: enthalpy.physics.buffalo.edu
> lab phone: 716-645-2017x122  Fax: 716-645-2507
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