schools

Some time back, I got this article but was too tired to finish the documentation. Then had computer problems and web site hacking, and just didn't remember to finish this page. Now it is posted for you to read. It is extremely interesting about destructive education in America.

Key point is the difference in defining education between 1927 and 1934. These ideas have led to the "School to Work" program now instituted in America.

I have big differences on some points with the author who wrote this article, but at least he is aware of much of the problem. Another problem of which he is not aware, is early American's were not studying democracy in our schools, they were studying a republic under God, with text-books and dictionaries that included Godly definitions and even scripture. The change to studying democracy was something achieved by John Dewey, as outlined in his book Democracy and Education. It was a goal of his goal was to use schools to convert America to a democracy instead of a republic.

...
author unknown,.... source, the world wide web....
However, except in a few instances, American students were never made aware of what was really going on in the world--in terms of the machinations of the "Higher Cabal." For example, the exposés of writers such as George Seldes or I. F. Stone would have been beyond the pale for most American schools. So Americans fought World War II ignorant of how U.S. companies had helped set up the Nazi regime in Germany and profitted from its killing of Allied soldiers.

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, American education began its rapid and almost total decline. In the latter half of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century, "education" has almost entirely been turned into mere training. The very definition of "education" has been twisted to make it appear to be training. For example,

the New Century Dictionary of the English Language (1927) defined education as: "the drawing out of a person's innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.--the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve."

whereas, education was defined in An Outline of Educational Psychology in 1934 in these terms: "Learning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction. Explanation of even such forms of learning as abstraction and generalization demand of the neurones [sic] only growth, excitability, conductivity, and modifiability. The mind is the connection-system of man; and learning is the process of connecting. The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences." By 1968, John Goodlad, one of the educational establishment's best known spokespersons, made it clear just what was important in "education."

"The most controversial issues of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question will not be 'what knowedge is of the the most worth?' but 'what kinds of human beings do we wish to produce?' The possibilities virtually defy our imagination."

"Learning and Teaching in the Future," Today's Education (journal of the National Education Association)

This reduction of "education" to neuron connection and behavior modification has now been completed by the most recent crippling of "education" as "work/study." An article defining this destruction of education appeared in National Review in 1993, with a revealing title: "The Competitiveness Illusion: Does our Country Need to Be Literate in Order to Be competitive? If Not, Why Read."

"Technological society turns out to work in the opposite way from that usually supposed: namely, by actually requiring less rather than more education of its workers. This is because modern industry depends on reducing human error, which means reducing dependence on the individual worker's expertise and judgment. In building or maintaining electronic devices, workers who once installed or rewired electrical circuits now plug in modular components consisting of machine-printed circuit boards. . . The future role of literacy in the workplace has been succinctly stated by Pierre Dogan, the president of Granite Communications, a company that is now 'developing software for hotel housekeeping.' It seems that 'so long as maids can read room numbers, they will be able to check off tasks completed or order supplies by simply touching pictures on the screen." Dogan points out that 'you can create a work program with prompting including iconic [picture] messages.' In fact, he logically concludes, 'you can use an illiterate workforce.'" Because of this twisting of "education" into training, as a university instructor I am faced with students who have never learned to read, write, or think. They are the wounded, deformed casualties of the "High Cabal's" war against the mind. But the educational establishment doesn't even recognize the devastated condition of American education. Many university professors, even full professors, cannot write or speak sound English. A department chair in a state university in California recently wrote a book, which he forced all students in the introductory class to buy, which contained over one hundred grammatical errors. Quota hiring is rampant in higher education. Unfortunately, the ability to speak intelligible English is no longer required, and students suffer the consequences.

Critical Consciousness

As education is subverted into mere training, three essentials of intelligence are being lost:

critical thinking

self-awareness

critical consciousness

Critical consciousness is the ability to perceive social, political, and economic oppression and to take action against the oppressive elements of society

The concept of critical consciousness (conscientizacao) was developed by Paulo Freire primarily in his books:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Education for Critical Consciousness

The tactics of critical consciousness and a pedagogy of the oppressed were first developed by Freire in his work with third-world people, helping them gain an awareness of world conditions while teaching them to read.

In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire exposed our educational system as one in which: the teacher is the depositor, the students are the depositories the teacher issues communiques (instead of communicating) which students passively receive, memorize, and repeat knowledge becomes a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those they consider to know nothing teachers and administrators choose the instructional program content and students adapt to it "The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role impressed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them."

Though Freire worked with various educators throughout the world, the concept of critical consciousness never had significant impact on pedagogical practice. In our current narcissistic era, schools at all levels teach students to pursue money and self-interest. As Gekko, the tycoon, says in the movie Wall Street, "Greed is good." A critical awareness of what is happening in the world is decidedly not a part of the contemporary curriculum--from grade school to graduate school.

If you examine graduate courses on Global Economy, for example, you'll not find a single mention of the terrible human costs: rising unemployment in the home economies, slave wages in the third world countries where manufacturing is relocated, runaway immigration, and a constant degradation of the environment.

Freire worked to help third-world people overcome illiteracy. Today, his insights can be applied to two different kinds illiteracy:
Those who cannot grasp the sense of letters or symbols
Those who can "read" (in the grammar school sense) but who cannot read: understand the meaning of the words they see
There are those today, for example, who "read" about such things as worker layoffs and American corporations relocating their manufacturing plants in China or Indonesia, but who do not understand the meaning of what they "read."
Another kind of modern-day "illiteracy" occurs as people "read" or "hear" the "news" in newspapers or on TV, and allow themselves to be taken in by the propaganda that such "news" involves.

Now, more than ever, we need to begin developing a critical consciousness in all of us who are oppressed by this new imperialistic strategy of globalism. We're up against a number of obstacles:
the lack of awareness that we are the oppressed
the lack of solidarity among the oppressed people
the loss of a common tradition of democracy and human rights
the indifference of oppressed people to their situation

Living in an age of repression, we become accustomed to it. So what if our schools no longer teach people how to read or think, no longer help students gain an understanding of why human liberty is so precious and precarious. Our movies, TV shows, and books present images of "cool," illiterate, violence-prone savages dressed in the latest styles and exhibiting the popular ego-centered attitudes. Unable to understand the creativity of a well-written novel or screenplay, no longer capable of appreciating the depths of classical music, people today move in a grey world of ego-gratification and violence. Soon the false values become identified as the true, and we have movies such as Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, and As Good As It Gets touted as masterpieces.

We only become aware of the oppressive nature of contemporary society when we become the victim of unemployment or a mugging or some other mishap. Trained to be oblivious to the plight of others, we fail to see the hundreds of thousands who suffer from homelessness, lack of medical care, and wage slavery.

Since people are encouraged to pursue their own interests, there is no feeling of solidarity and hence no possibility of concerted effort to overcome the oppressive conditions. It seems perfectly normal that a two-class society is rapidly developing, with new billionaires being created every year while millions of workers are laid off, denied welfare, and their tax money stolen by wealthy looters in such scams as the Enron/Anderson swindle, the savings and loan fraud, the Mexican "loan" scandal, and the IMF repayment to wealthy investors who suffered from the Asian stockmarket crash.

We must begin to awaken ourselves to what's happening in the world and taking action to overcome the oppressive conditions. And here Freire's books are exceptionally helpful.

"Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors' violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity."

As oppressed people we must become aware of what has happened to us and develop our own sense of what it means to be truly human.

"How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be 'hosts' of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization."

As we begin to struggle against oppressive conditions, we must retain an optimistic attitude, with assurance that the struggle for freedom will ultimately succeed.

"In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit , but as a limiting situation which they can transform."

We need to struggle against all the different forms of oppression:
External
Political: for example, making people think that politicians aren't bought by big money
Economic: making people into wage slaves and creating increased unemployment
Military: creating huge defense budgets so the military-supply corporations make obscene profits
Informational: making people think that the false information they're being given is true

Internal
Allowing ourselves to become people who want others to make all major decisions for us
Failing to keep ourselves informed about what's happening in the world
Failing to become aware of our own prejudices and blind spots
Making ourselves believe that we can't change ourselves and our world

Oppressors, persons who have become possessed (literally) with the idea that "having" is the ultimate value, lose the ability to think rationally over time. At present, the plutocratic elite is blind to anything but their own frenzy to gain more wealth and fame. They are unaware that they are creating the very circumstances of their defeat: a society in which larger numbers of people are falling into poverty, where people of all ethnic, gender, and religious groupings are beginning to see that their common enemy is the plutocratic, corporate-based plunderer class.

The War Against Intelligence
America today is a combat zone where the War Against Intelligence is constantly being waged. Unfortunately, the rulers are currently winning: Americans are progressively losing their ability to understand what is happening in the world around them. Americans are unable to see that the Bush administration is using the pretext of the war against terrorism to destroy essential constitutional liberties. Billions of dollars have been stolen by the wealthy while the working class is devastated through unemployment and lower wages. A poor person is jailed for a $20 theft, but a plutocrat is allowed to steal the pension fund of thousands of workers without penalty.

The Bush administration's first attack on American learning was the Education Bill signed into law by President Bush in January, 2002. The bill essentially equates education with training for high test scores. Those who benefit most from this new law are not students or teachers but the publishers of textbooks and companies that carry out testing. To see how these benefiting companies are directly tied to the Bush family, see below.

Now the Bush-aligned Supreme Court has delivered the coup de grace to American education. Our tax dollars can now be used to fund training in any religious or political ideology imaginable. Granted, public funds since the 1950s have been used exclusively to dumb down America, but tax dollars did not go to support ideologically-based schools that were totally inimical to American values.

That's the difficulty; we've lost any effective understanding of what American values are. So now, the "High Cabal" is going to destroy any unity among Americans through this new educational anarchy. Bush and his controllers think that they're going to be able to fund primarily, if not exclusively, private Roman Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist schools that teach unthinking obedience to authoritarian leaders. That's their primary purpose for this catastrophic blow to American education. How they're going to disallow public funds for the extremist schools--the Islamic fundamentalist madrasa, the Jewish anti-Islamic school, the right wing militia school, or any other ideologically-based fanatical school--remains to be seen.

Supreme Court Justice Breyer, who dissented from the 5-4 ruling, predicted that the decision would prove highly divisive in a country with "more then 55 different religious groups." He foresees many struggles, asking, "How will the public react to government funding for schools that take controversial religious positions on topics that are of current popular interest--say, the conflict in the Middle East or the war on terrorism?" Precisely!

Justice John Paul Stevens, another one who dissented from the majority called the recent ruling "profoundly misguided." He wrote, "Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy."

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court in a 1998 ruling allowed their voucher system to stand, some 6,000 students make use of the vouchers, worth about $5,000 apiece. This results in $30 million being funneled from the budget of the Milwaukee school district into the coffers of the Catholic Church and other private schools. With this new ruling, the program can now be fully utilized, so that 15,000 students can leave the system, cutting the funding of the public schools by $75 million.

Republican supporters of the voucher hide the fact from the public that the crisis in the schools is largely the product of decades of federal, state and local spending cuts, tax breaks to big business and attacks on teachers' and other school employees' wages and working conditions.

Privately-run schools will continue to screen applicants and reject any student they deem unacceptable. While the language of most voucher programs prohibits discrimination based on race or national origin, these schools can reject students based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, ability to pay, behavioral issues or academic or physical ability. They would be under no financial pressure to provide help for students with special needs, since it is more costly to provide care for special education children, and most private schools are not staffed to handle them.

The newly-sanctioned voucher system will intensify class and social distinctions. The top schools will be reserved for the wealthiest layers of society who can pay to send their children to elite private schools and academies. Next below on the totem pole will be the private and for-profit schools for middle-class and working class children, whose parents will have to work longer hours and go further into debt to scrape together thousands of dollars to pay tuition costs. At the very bottom will be the public schools, left for the poorest and most disadvantaged working class students. Unable to do little to help working class youth develop learning skills, the role of these schools will be little more than training lower-class students for low-paying jobs.

Beginning at the time of the American revolution, part of the genius of the nation has been the right to public education, based on the idea that all children, regardless of economic or social status, race, religion or ethnic background, be guaranteed government-paid, quality education. Founding fathers such as Jefferson favored the establishment of government-funded “free schools” in opposition to the aristocratic system in Europe, where education was limited to the wealthiest layers of society and largely overseen by the Church.

In the nineteenth century these democratic principles were advanced by such reformers as Horace Mann, who wrote in 1848:

“If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.” In the early part of the twentieth century, the working class took up the fight for public education, which was inseparable from the campaign against child labor. However it was only through the civil rights struggles, from the 1930s through 1960s, that universal access to the public schools was fully achieved.

Now, in the twenty-first century the right to sound public education for the working class has come into collision with the plans of the "High Cabal" for a society primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. The rampant growth of class inequality has produced a state of affairs that is fundamentally incompatible with democratic principles, which are based on the equal rights of all citizens.

The whole issue of public money for ideologically-based schools will prove extremely divisive throughout the nation. The Republicans, the majority of whom support vouchers, will use the issue as a way to attack any Democrat who opposes vouchers as a tool of the teacher unions.

Americans are rapidly losing a sense of the traditional American values. Anti-intellectual, racist or right-wing multiculturalism has replaced education, bought-and-paid-for-politics has replaced democracy, funneling billions to the fat-cats has replaced statesmanship, and attacks on constitutional liberties has replaced political and judicial oversight.

Americans must now awaken to this horror and once again, if possible, create a public education system which will become the means to transmit to future generations an understanding of the hidden meaning of events and lost democratic concepts. If the ravages that the "High Cabal" have wreaked on the public school system are so fundamental that we cannot rejuvenate it, we may have to create our own private "democracy schools" to help us regain our sense, our ability to see what's happening, our intelligence. When our nation was founded, education was carried on primarily through just such private home schools where Americans learned the values of a democratic way of life.

As some are warning, any government system--public schools or voucher-based private schools--carries government control with it. If the "High Cabal" uses the voucher system to gain total ideological control of private schools, we may have to create completely private "democracy schools" without resorting to vouchers.

Education must become the transmission of true human understanding to future generations. This will require a group of people assisting others to see that current "politics" and "education" are actually counterfeits of real social values, and developing institutions which will provide insight into what is actually occurring in the world.