Wednesday, September 18, 2002
VI. Textbooks: A Scourge on the Landscape
September 18, 2002
"One wonders what idea of history is present in the minds of those who teach it; whether the goal of historical studies is to make one historically-learned or historically-minded. Properly, history shapes the mind into a tool to think with, not to remember with. One would not give a button for all the routine historical learning in the world; by comparison with the appraising power of historical-mindedness. The best thing this power does, moreover--the really inestimable benefit that it confers--is to show when one need not waste one’s effort in trying to appraise at all, but may contentedly let the matter appraise itself into Time’s great rubbish-heap. Thus about ninety-nine percent of the "new" and "modern" is comfortably disposed of without one’s having to lend one’s energies to the process; and thus, again, one lives longer and is happier."
Albert J. Nock, "NEW AND MODERN," The Freeman, 1930
I’ll admit the title of this essay might be an exaggeration, but not that much. I’m often asked why we homeschool our two children. The question is interesting. Sometimes I’d like to answer, "You are kidding, right? It should be obvious, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t we homeschool? Why don’t you?" I don’t say that, but sometimes I think it. So reason number 5,945 of why we homeschool: Textbooks.
When we lived in New Jersey, one of my daughter’s friends would come to our house after school to do her homework. Her mother worked and so the little girl found a place where she could get assistance with her homework and get it done before her mother got home from work. It was a privilege to help out. She could manage her way through most of the homework, but would need help with math or social studies. She was a year ahead of my daughter, so I had a taste of what my daughter would be getting the following year.
The social studies textbook had a picture of King Tut on the cover—so parents with children in the sixth grade will be familiar with it. What amazed my husband and me was how many errors it contained. These weren’t huge, glaring errors, but there were errors. I recall one about a Sumerian King and his dynasty. It was the right King but wrong dynasty. This wasn’t earth-shattering and no child would be forever damaged with this little tidbit of error, but it’s the principle. They should get this right, shouldn’t they? My husband is not a Sumerian scholar and he caught it. A quick verification was made against Britannica to confirm our suspicion. Yup, the textbook was wrong. From then onwards, we were very careful in helping with homework and cross-checked the book’s facts. We found more errors of this same type.
So gripe number one with textbooks is their errors. But it doesn’t end there and that isn’t the main reason I detest them.
When I was in middle and high school, we weren’t allowed to use Cliff Notes. We were supposed to read the books assigned. What a concept, eh? We were supposed to read Romeo and Juliet, not scan the condensed, highlights in Cliff Notes. (I seldom did, but that’s a different topic.) But the irony was that in subjects such as social studies, the very material that was distributed to students was the Cliff Notes version of history--the textbook.
I remember doing some of my homework with my mother. We were in the section of our textbook on the Industrial Revolution. I was writing some essay or report about it and wrote a sentence that said something along the lines of "at this time, all of America was purchasing new products such as irons, washing machines, and radio." My mother, in a state of bewilderment and frustration responded to it with, "no, that was not it at all. All of America was doing no such thing." Hmmm, I thought. They weren’t? "But Mom, it says so in the textbook" flipping to the page where it said it.
And she was right. The Industrial Revolution marked an era where these types of products became available. Millions of irons were sold, but there were roughly 110 million people in the U.S. at that time, roughly 50 million households. GE hadn’t manufactured 5 million irons, let alone 50 million. A very small subset of the U.S. was purchasing these things, because the vast majority of the country was still very rural and didn’t have electricity—many would not until 50 or more years later. It changes your perspective a leetle-bit when you know that we weren’t all that industrialized until the 1950s. Men went off to fight WWII and they only had gas light or candles in their homes. In some coal mining towns they still haven’t revolutionized.
The point was that it is easy to make sweeping statements and generalizations about a period or a people, when you don’t get into the details. My mother wasn’t born until 1923, but she knew they didn’t install electricity in her childhood home until the 1930s, and they were wealthy! Without my mother’s constant review of the material I was taught, I might very well have believed that in 1910, every house in America had an iron, a telephone, a radio, an icebox, and washing machine. The reality was no where close. This was an important distinction in that technology and the impacts of technology on lifestyle tells you a great deal about a people.
My mother did the same thing when I was in my required, eleventh grade Government class. "Yes, I understand that Social Darwinism is the context of the conservative party, but it’s not LITERAL. We don’t REALLY expect people to slay lions to survive. The concept is based on believing in people and respecting their self-reliance." I went to class the next day and challenged my left-leaning teacher when he mentioned it again. When cornered, he back-peddled. "Yes, that is correct. It is a concept and not taken literally by those who call themselves Conservatives." Mission accomplished—a little truth about the make-up of conservatives had entered our liberal-biased classroom.
When my daughter started the sixth grade (her last year in public school) she came home and announced laughing, "Look Mom," and pulling the book from her backpack, "I got the same textbook Kelly had last year. You know the one that has all the wrong stuff in it?" Oh joy. We quickly went to the Sumerian reference. It hadn’t been changed, or even redacted by the school (and we had sent them a note about the error the previous year). The school could not be bothered to type up an errata--that would be too onerous or complicated. It was much easier to continue teaching it wrong.
The problem, besides factual errors and generalizations, is one of passion and political correctness. The page on evolution is four paragraphs. They cannot go into detail about it because it’s too controversial. There are three paragraphs on Darwin’s "theory" of evolution, followed by a weasel paragraph about other "theories" as well. Note to textbook writer: Evolution is a fact. The "theory" is how it works, not IF it exists. Darwin got some of the theory wrong, on the timing, and other events, but the concept is factual and is not disputed amongst reputable scientists.
Regarding the issue of passion, let’s stay with Darwin for a moment. Three paragraphs? The Scopes "Monkey Trial," the continuing battles between Christian-sects demanding that it be censored, the revolutionary implications to science and medicine, the jailing of teachers for intentionally violating its ban, and the ramifications to Darwin personally when he published the work. You didn’t buck the system and you certainly didn’t publish anything that was contrary to biblical teachings. The entire subject is mired in controversy, the search for truth, and the dangers of censorship. You cannot teach that in three paragraphs. You cannot teach that in 30 paragraphs! But the lesson and the purpose of teaching this subject is in the details, not the summarized version. It is ho-hum, boring that Darwin had a theory in the 19th century. The real lesson is how he had to overcome prejudices, received death threats, and was ostracized for doing it. How, even in the U.S. there were many who wanted (and continue to want) to censor this because it disagrees with a significant portion of the population’s religious views. When you put this subject through the sieve of summarization and then pass it by the political correctness nannies, all that is left is a series of mindless details--details that do nothing to warn children of the dangers of censorship and succumbing to popular opinion. Challenging accepted notions is how science evolves and grows. These events were a classic example of this.
By learning about Darwin and the "theory of evolution" we learn more than science. When we present all its details, all its ugliness, and the self-righteousness of all sides of it, you see a pattern. There is a pattern to all attempts at censorship. It’s the patterns and the clues to recognizing a pattern that is the purpose of teaching history, as Nock pointed out in the introductory paragraph. If Darwin is too controversial, try Columbus, when he had the gall to suggest that the earth was round, or Copernicus for suggesting that the Sun was the center of the universe, not the earth, or Martin Luther King when he suggested that black children might do as well as whites if they weren’t banned from white schools. All of these people challenged the status quo and they suffered dearly for it, yet we benefited as a civilization for their courage.
[Note to "Creationist" teaching parents: I fully respect your right to teach your Christian view of history rather than what you refer to as, "the secular view." I respect your right to send your children to religious schools or to home educate with your religion’s syllabus. What I do not respect is the infringement and lawsuits which prevent the teaching of Darwin and evolution in the public school forum. Religious beliefs are to be respected—as long as they remain in private homes and in the churches, temples, and mosques, and NOT in the public forum. Once they leave the land of the exempt, they must withstand public scrutiny and peer review.]
There are so many other examples of the passion of history reduced to a series of uninteresting facts. I would much rather that children spent an entire semester studying one battle of the Civil War than an entire semester on "American History." At least at the end of the semester they’d know something, rather than nothing. They’d have learned all the grit of history, known the life stories of those who died, how the wounds were treated, etc. Instead, they know a little bit about nothing—nothing useful, nothing that will spark an interest, change an opinion, or make them historically-minded, rather that the dull and boring historically-learned.
It doesn’t matter WHEN the Civil War occurred as much as it matters WHY it happened. It doesn’t matter that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, what matters is why they bombed it, how we ignored the warnings on radar, how the people felt about it, how it caused the U.S. to enter the war, how it silenced the pacifists, how it allowed our entry into the European theatre, and how it eventually ended, justifiably, with the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima. If we don’t know the details between the highlights, we’ve learned nothing. We study history so we can learn from it—and not repeat the same errors. If we scan through it, as we might scan through the TV Guide looking for something interesting to watch, we miss the entire purpose of learning history. We might as well spend our time in classrooms making brooms or memorizing baseball stats, for all the good it will do.
Monday, May 13, 2002
V. Safe: When it is no longer safe to be safe
Until I was 11, we lived in a suburb in the San Fernando Valley. At that time, Woodland Hills, California was the last outpost of the Valley and it was a small community, later split into property value castes by the Ventura Freeway. Our tract home had cottage cheese ceilings and burnt-yellow appliances. It was Ozzie and Harriet land, with a few drops of Stepford Wives thrown in for color.
I received an allowance of 25 cents per week. I earned this quarter if I picked up the living room, before my mother got home from work (we were atypical--one of the early divorces of the 60s).
The local ice cream truck still made its daily rounds. Some days, I’d buy an ice cream or a Popsicle for a dime. For the entire quarter, I could buy a grab bag. It included an ice cream, a small piece of candy, and a toy. Most of the time, the contents didn’t merit the high cost, but on some occasions the toy made it worthwhile, worth the gamble every other time. The toy I loved most was a small rocket. It was shaped like a Buck Rogers era toy and was crudely made of some heavy metal. (It must have been lead.)
Anyway, the rocket came with a roll of caps. The object was to place a cap in the protracting slot at the tip of the rocket, throw it up into the air, and the top heavy point would land point down, causing the cap to pop. It was great fun. You had to be careful not to touch the tip of the rocket too soon, as it would be hot. Waiting for the tip to cool slowed the game quite a bit. I’d play on the cement front porch for hours, or until the caps ran out.
I loved caps. Sometimes, probably because the roll was a little damp, the dud to active cap ratio would frustrate me. If the slightly damaged cap didn’t land in the rocket just right, or the cap would slip in the slot, the cap wouldn’t BANG. It would fizz. This was useless. When I’d determine that I had a dud roll, the rocket would be cast aside. I’d go into the house and fetch a hammer. I’d roll out the long string of caps and bang each one individually. The harder and more direct hit with the hammer could make even a slightly-dud cap, BANG. The only downside was that it was quicker and the caps would run out before my desire to end the game. I’d have to come up with ways to slow the game down so it wouldn’t end too soon, sometimes by throwing a big rock at the string of caps.
I never see caps anymore. They used to be sold with cap guns and other like devices in the toy aisles of grocery stores, where I’d hang out, for at least part of every grocery shopping trip.
I wasn’t a spoiled child. Our single-parent income prevented my every whim from being sated. But I’d always ASK for something. It never surprised me to be told, “No.” I expected that the response would be negative, but I always tried. "It’s good to want things" my mother would tell me. Sometimes, the answer would be, “ok.”
Cap toys made up the majority of the junk toys in these sections. Even gumball machines sometimes had a cap gun type toy. As I recall, a roll of caps was a nickel or a dime, cheap thrills for a child. I loved the smell. I also loved the smell of a struck match. Blowing out an adult’s match and getting to hold it and smell it was a special treat. You quickly learn how to take a hot match from someone without touching the black part. The black part is hot, long after the match is blown out. I never played with matches by striking a match on my own, mind you. Matches were “too dangerous,” as were firecrackers (plus, only boys played with firecrackers). But caps? They were toys.
I got burned quite frequently when I’d play with caps, but that didn’t stop me from continuing the play. If the burn was a bad one, I’d stop playing and go in the house for boo-boo treatments. The pain I experienced didn’t keep me from doing it again another day. No one suggested that I should stop playing with caps because I got burned so often. The burn was part of the excitement. It was risky. Woohoo, danger! I also learned how to handle the caps and aim better with the hammer. A slip or a miss meant a burn.
Someone had also shown me how to pop a cap with a thumbnail scratch, but that always hurt and didn’t seem worth it. A rock or hammer would work just as well, without the higher risk.
I guess the reason I don’t see caps anymore is that they are no longer considered a suitable toy for children. “They might get hurt.”
“They might get hurt” seems to be the reason children don’t do a lot of things. Even adult activities are barred from the home, because a child “might get hurt.” This extends to all sorts of things, gun ownership, drinking alcohol, dart boards, etc. Anything that an unsupervised child might get hurt by touching or seeing, is now taboo.
No longer is there such a thing as "responsible drinking." All drinking is now considered irresponsible, if you have children. Most children don’t see adult role models engaging in dangerous activities and showing restraint or self-control. Neither do children see their parents screw-up, and needing to call a taxi to get home, because they drank too much. A child witnessing this behavior, and retelling the episode to their peers, could result in a social worker knocking on your door to investigate the reckless behaviors of the parents. [Doesn’t anyone read Orwell anymore?] What children see is that adults are too afraid of something to take any risks. What, exactly, adults are afraid of, must be a continuous mystery to young children.
I know there are kids that still ride dirt bikes, go-carts, and participate in motor-cross racing. These kids are rare and their parents are spoken of in whispers and with raised eyebrows, “they let their kid do something so dangerous, that’s just ghastly.” There was even a recent case where a day care center was fined for having violent toys in their toy chest. Guess what this violent toy was? A green army man (see Fred Reed’s essay on Green Soldiers and Violence, that detailed this unbelievable incident). I can only imagine the reaction to a cap gun.
Once kids get out of these over-protective homes, day care centers, and schools, they seem to find all sorts of things to do that are dangerous. Even sex today is a danger, a life threatening danger, no longer simply a life altering danger. Some adults do all sorts of really dangerous things: bungee jump, hang glide, sky dive, and mountain bike. Other less physical kids and adults use drugs, join gangs, and other sociopath or self-destructive behaviors.
I did a little experimenting when I was a teenager too. But I set boundaries for myself by the time I was 14 and dismissed all peer pressure to do otherwise. This didn’t do my social status any good, but I didn’t care. A few friends had died of drug overdoses in the summer between my 9th and 10th grade semesters. My mother had little or no knowledge of the temptations I faced each day. These wouldn’t be things we’d talk about, especially in the literal. Parents of the 60s told us what we were allowed to do and what we were not allowed to do. We didn’t have "discussions" and no one had "feelings" on any subject of conduct or character matters.
But I knew that some things were too dangerous and they weren’t worth the risk, even without having them listed for me or discussed. I understood risk, and I’d learned by the time I was 7 or 8 that some activities were worth it and others weren’t. You see, I knew what it was like to get burned.
IV. Entrenched
Why are we so reluctant to consider logical alternatives?
My brother, Greg, was an extremely intelligent man. He was one of those people, who as a boy, didn’t do well in school, because he was bored. His IQ scores were off the charts, but his grades were often Cs and Ds. It frustrated my parents and his teachers.
As all of us who were his sisters can attest, he was prone to mischief. In this regard, he was very boy-like, and needed to be kept busy to keep him out of trouble. The mischievous streak only got more subtle as he got older (I was in my twenties before I stopped worrying about finding rubber spiders in my shoes, but to this day, I consider the possibility).
Greg and I had something in common: we both got mixed grades in school. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, we’d ace a class. Other times, we’d barely get out with a passing grade. The reason wasn’t our lack of ability; on the contrary, there was no pattern in our successes or our failures. One year we might ace a science or history class, the next year fail in the same subject, the following year, an ace again. The reason was actually quite simple and logical, so logical and obvious, it was easy to miss and overlook: It was our reaction to the teacher. If the teacher took our lack of interest as being too dumb to pass their class, we’d write the teacher off, and protested against the teacher in the only way we could. If the teacher recognized that we were simply bored, and gave us something extra to do, we’d excel. In hindsight, it seems so logical, but we were kids and couldn’t have articulated our needs to anyone.
I’m sure that today a teacher would suggest Ritalin for my brother, mistaking his tendency to fidget as his problem, rather than recognizing the symptom as a sign that the content was beneath him.
Being the youngest of the family, and my brother’s junior by 11 years, I only got to know him as a man when I reached maturity. I was, and would always be, his “baby sister,” but as we both got older, we became best friends.
Greg didn’t go to college. None of us did. I’m not sure why, exactly, but we grew up in the ‘60s, a time when you had to leave home to do the stuff you wanted to do, so everyone left home early and began working right away, leaving the baby sister (me) at home. The lack of college degree was never a major obstacle for any of us, because what we lacked in credentials, we made up for in tenacity and common sense.
We used to call Greg "Mr. Spock," because he was so damned logical. He’d play toothpick games with a pad and pencil so that he could write an algebra equation to determine his next move, assuring his victory. We were a competitive family, in all things: Canasta, Monopoly, Marco Polo, income, and stuff. For example, he got the family’s first cell-phone, and within a week, ‘coz Greg did it, we all had one. I did get the family’s first VCR, but I held the title for only 3 hours, as Greg went out to buy one immediately on the discovery that I had one.
Greg moved up the ladder at his computer operations profession quite quickly. Within 7 years he went from tape mounting to Manager of Operations at USC. After that, he moved to UCLA. Until his death in 1995, he was Manager of Operations of Administrative Computing, and a finer record of productivity was never accomplished, before or after him.
Because I was younger, I entered the workforce much later than he, but he’d laid the groundwork and set the example. Doing a good job wasn’t enough, you had to advance. Get fired? Never! It was something I took for granted, ‘coz Greg did it. It’s just what you did. One of my worst regrets was that he died before I could earn more than he did. He won, dammit! But, then, he always did.
Doing something obviously stupid, and being found out, was a horrible fate in our family. So, when together, we were always on our guard. As you might imagine, finding a flaw in anything Greg did was a major accomplishment. He’d laugh louder than any one if he was caught in the act of stupidity.
He had the best kitchen, of course (he was a gourmet cook), and one of his prize possessions was his Sub Zero refrigerator. It didn’t have an ice maker though. I lived with him, off and on, while in my twenties, and followed his house rules about ice: when the ice basket was empty, you weren’t allowed to empty just one of the ice trays, you had to empty all four and refill them all. You had to do this if you took the last of the ice too (so you worked hard never to take the last of the ice). Hey, it was his house, his rules, but that didn’t mean you stopped looking for a loophole.
The problem was that the ice trays stacked on top of the ice basket. If the ice trays had been recently refilled, you couldn’t easily get to the ice without spilling water. It was a major pain, but something we dealt with, because that’s the way the basket and trays had been designed and that’s how they fit together.
Once, when our sister, Gail, was over (Greg’s twin), Greg opened the freezer and turned around accusingly and said, “WHO DID THAT?” Oh dear, what had we done and what was he talking about? “Did WHAT?” we asked. “Who put the ice trays UNDER the ice basket?” Gail, honest to the core, sheepishly responded, “I did.” “And you did that why?” Greg asked, toying with us. “Because if you put them way they’re supposed to go, on top, they spill” Gail responded. At this point, Greg, being found out, started to laugh and chided himself for being so stupid. “Do you know how long I’ve been dealing with spilled water, never having considered the possibility of putting the newly filled ice trays UNDER the basket? It never occurred to me to put them UNDER the basket. What an idiot.” Gail scored big time, even against the wits of Mr. Spock.
Even Mr. Spock could sometimes miss the blatantly obvious.
Thomas Sowell’s new book, Late Talking Children, details the accounts of a subset of late talking children who are not developmentally disabled or autistic and are often misdiagnosed.
In reading reviews about the book, which is so easy to do on the Internet, I stumbled on a site, Apraxia-Kids. On this site was an entire page of letters, lambasting Mr. Sowell’s book. I read the letters. They mostly followed a similar theme: Sowell is anti-public school so he is biased, he should have been more careful because more children’s problems might be ignored, etc. The letters also had another common theme: Doesn’t he know that children who are late talkers will have a difficult time in public school, and the feelings of failure in public school could set them up for a lifetime of failure, unless some drastic, invasive actions are taken?
Yes. That’s exactly the point. It isn’t the fact that they are late talkers that is the problem. The problem is that they aren’t going to do well in public school, because public school only benefits the “normal” and middle spectrums of normal, no less. Children who are not “normal,” despite every trick or invasion to force them to be, will never become “normal.” Our attempts to force children into some state of normalcy will fail. Plus, “normal” isn’t all it’s cracked-up to be. Why are we so entrenched in wanting kids to be "normal" even when some, obviously, are not?
What people fail to realize is that taking invasive and drastic measures may do as much harm to the child, as not doing well in public school. If a life-pattern of failure is a logical result of failing in public school, why do it at all? Take “abnormal” kids out of public school and the problem goes away.
Just like putting the wet ice trays UNDER the basket.
Friday, May 10, 2002
III. Academic Excellence
Academic excellence is a term that has changed its meaning over the centuries. Education, once a bastion of the rich and powerful, became available to the common man with the miracle of a single invention. This single invention, beyond the microchip, the combustion engine, and aspirin had more impact on history than any other single or combined inventions of the last thousand years. What single invention? The printing press.
The printing press was first put to use reproducing the Judeo/Christian texts. Scribes, who once devoted their lives to copying the scripture, could now devote their time and energy to their flocks. But, this was not the only group who lost their jobs to technology, although they were likely the first group to suffer layoffs due to automation. With the printing press came standardization, an agreed upon text that could not be easily altered in each successive edition by the creative or sinister interpretation of the scribe. As had been done by earlier Papal revisionists, too many copies were in circulation for anyone to make significant alterations without notice by the masses. Therefore, the printing press did more than make reproduction of the written word faster, it made historical revisionism impossible.
After sufficient machines were set pumping out the Bible, they were used to reproduce other precious manuscripts: Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aurelius, and other contributors to the Western Canon. These texts were previously owned and read only by the privileged and ruling classes and were the basis of academic study. Their inexpensive reproduction made it possible for these texts to fall into the hands of a man outside of the ruling class.
Time continues on and eventually all the great literary and scholarly works were set to type and bound for the consumption of the masses. New techniques in binding and paper manufacture reduced the costs further, to the point where, even the middle classes could own a copy of Aurelius, Locke, Byron or Shakespeare.
In the beginning, all books were printed in their original Latin or Greek. If you were educated, you read Latin or Greek, not wanting to trust your academic pursuits to a translator, or the selection limited by intentional or accidental translation omission. College and private libraries were filled with 10,000 years of recorded history. If a student spent his days in that library, reading the wisdom of the ages, he could expect, even without debate our discourse, to come out of library doors educated.
There are direct correlations to the increase in the body of literature and the availability of printed texts. As more and more people read what had been written, absorbed the success and foibles of civilizations past, new theories emerged, and the people formulated new governments based on the successes of previous civilizations.
They knew what would work, because it had worked countless times in the past. They also knew what would fail, the signs of impending doom, the first signs towards an Orwellian destiny, or Sodom and Gomorra outcome.
As part of the American experiment, public libraries brought the wisdom of the ancient and modern tomes to the common man. Latin was taught in grammar school so that each new generation could study our shared history through the written word.
The concept of the public library was a new dynamic. It should not be surprising then, that our Founding Fathers, all readers and scholars of the Western Canon, should expect that the availability of these texts for the masses would lead to an enlightened age. They fully expected that all citizens, once properly versed in 10,000 years of history could and would understand the brilliance of the American doctrine, would protect and defend their freedoms, understand the basic principles of liberty and recognize its enemies, and peace and prosperity would prevail. It should also be clear why the first protection guaranteed to all citizens was the freedom of the presses and of thought, for they understood that through the suppression of ideas, historical revisionism, that all great civilizations became tyrannies.
Tyrants are successful only when the people are ignorant. Our Founding Fathers understood this. Marx understood this. Lenin understood this. All great men of principle and all tyrants understood this.
It was with this in mind that Jefferson began his pursuit of public education. Make libraries and classrooms available to all, allow the common man the time and privilege of reading the works of history, and he too will become educated, prosperous, and able to pursue his own path of happiness.
But the experiment failed. Why?
At the turn of the last century, Jefferson’s worst fears came to fruition. The masses moved from an agrarian lifestyle to one focused on urban manufacture. Jefferson prophesized that one of the biggest threats to corruption of government was through manufacturing entities assuming control of our governments:
"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe ."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787
"While we have land to labor, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry; but for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe . It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there than bring them to the provision and materials and with them their manners and principles."
--Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia , Q.XIX, 1782
As we entered the industrial age, manufacturers were dissatisfied with the workforce. An educated and independent man would not stand for hours at an assembly line. He was not docile or complacent. The manufacturers conspired with government, and with the communists and socialists of the era, to remake public education--not one in which we would turn out educated men and women, but factory drones who would respond like Pavlov’s dog to the ringing of bells and factory whistles. It was at this time, that the school model was altered, dramatically altered. The school model, once an open classroom of debate and civil discourse, now mirrored the factory floor. Bells and factory whistles were added to public schools, student study periods were shortened so that students became used to moving from area to area, by the clock instead of at the completion of an assignment. Arrive at a set time, eat at a set time, even hunger was scheduled for every person. Independent thought and individual pursuits of excellence were labeled as elitist in the propaganda of the era. Factory owners wanted worker drones and the unscrupulous government legislators conspired in their manufacture.
It seems strange that the Capitalist manufacturers should conspire with the communists, but they did. The communists and socialists saw this as a means to an end. They understood that the undervalued and overworked worker would be the basis of a cultural revolution and so they colluded with manufacturers, who were themselves ignorant of the risks, to set in motion the path to anarchy and dissatisfaction.
"You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."
--John Dewey
It was through communists and behavioral theorists, such as Dewey, that the educational model shifted from one of individual and scholarly pursuit to one of collective reprogramming. The concept of an individual’s unique pursuit of happiness was modified and a canned and bottled definition of what would constitute happiness was promoted: 3 rooms and a bath, 2.5 children, access to convenience products, all acquired and maintained by a permanent manufacture job. It was also at this time that the teaching of Latin was eliminated. How best to seal the fate of the masses by closing the door on 10,000 years of history?
Up until the 1920s and early 1930s our Universities still provided a liberal arts education, based on the study of literature, history, and the reading and discussion of the Western Canon. It took another generation, the graduates of a Latin-free education, entering college before the Latin texts were removed from University libraries. There was no party or book burning ceremony in these institutions, but surely the ilk of Dewey delighted at their removal.
"In 50 years, we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school, to teaching remedial English in college."
--Joseph Sobran
The definition of an educated man changed. An educated man, who once stood as the gatekeeper of tyranny and oppression, had been destroyed. Our educational institutions became trade and technical schools where we turned out MBAs, engineers, doctors and other skilled technicians, gone were the degrees of letters and liberal arts scholars. The masses were now defenseless against the roots of oppression, ignorant to the warning signs of tyranny, and all but blind to the Orwellian and Machiavellian signals that their liberty was coming to an end. Education remodeled itself to one that trained the masses in trade and manufacture, it was education no longer, but merely institutionalized apprenticeship and social reconditioning.
Even today more recent additions to the Western Canon are being removed from our public school libraries. Works such as Huckleberry Finn and the collected works of G.A. Henty, are being removed under the guise of obliterating racism or gender stereotyping, both the new buzz phrases and double-speak for the old practice of book burning and historical revisionism. This gave rise to multiculturalism, the final step in the obliteration of the Western Canon.
Students of history also know that there always exists a remnant who will work against oppression. They are often spoken of as the meek and the innocent. They seem to appear out of nowhere. This remnant is among us now and has worked silently to overthrow the educational abuses of the last 100 years. The remnant were unable to work within the system to remake and restore public education and so they worked, as all revolutionaries do in the beginning, on the fringes and in the backrooms and basements. They developed and supported each other through underground and grassroots efforts, protecting each other from attack by joining of forces and unimaginable partnerships and alliances. These educational revolutionaries make for strange bedfellows. The first on the battle lines were the religious-right, removing their children from the hands of the brain washing educators. The groundwork done, the pathway cleared, they were followed none too distantly by the educational elitists, often atheists and humanists, who saw that the only way to restore our nation was through education of their children. When the religious-right and the humanists join together for a common cause, no external entity can put down their efforts.
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
--Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820
This remnant now has significant numbers to come out of the closet, although they represent only a minority of two or three million in number. Their solidarity to the cause can no longer be put down or dismissed as a group of reactionaries or extremists. This feat has been accomplished again by the printing press, albeit the modern electronic version, made possible by the Internet.
The public school machine is still working hard to put down this rebellion by legislating that a parent cannot educate a child as they see fit, by attempting to proscribe their own version of what constitutes education by requiring uniform and standarized tests, attempting to control Internet content, to profile individuals and families as potential terrorists or child abusers if they insist on "thinking outside the box" or outside the factory or office floor. Daily accounts are reported of the intrusions of school boards, truant officers, and social workers dog at their resolve and attempt to chip away at their successes: threat of jail, fines, and in some cases the attempt to separate children from their parents. But the masses are not swallowing it any longer, as the evidence put forth by the remnant is irrefutable.
Academic excellence has once again been achieved by the remnant by outperforming on in every imaginable area: spelling bees, SAT and ACT exams, and in psychiatric studies that show that their children are more (not less) socialized and adaptable, more self-assured, and more productive and happier as adults, than their institutionally reengineered counterparts.
The final argument used by the public school is one of socialization and their failed attempts to convince the masses that children need indoctrination and must become social conformists by association with their peers. They attempt to veil their indoctrination attempts by describing a child’s need to be with other children, when in fact the goal is to separate children from their parents and other adults, at earlier and earlier ages, to prevent adults from shielding them from the abuses of social reengineering. The social indoctrination camps, the public schools, are having more and more difficulty, because their lies and self-produced and tampered studies have been refuted and debunked.
These revolutionaries are not soldiers, nor are they outspoken or versed in soap boxing, they are the silent minority of organized and solidified parents who home school their children. Homeschoolers have restored meaning to the term academic excellence and are a force that is our greatest hope to restore liberty to our nation.
To find the educational remnant and fellow revolutionaries you can begin your search at:
- http://www.hslda.org
- http://www.sepschool.org
- Dumbing Us Down : The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
by John Taylor Gatto - Or at our sister site, http://www.illinoishomeschool.com/ihs or http://www.homeschool-texas.com/ihs
Other recommended reading:
- The Burden of Bad Ideas, Heather MacDonald
- An Autobiography of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock
- The Disadvantages of Being Educated, Albert Jay Nock
- Albert Jay Nock on Education, Wendy McElroy
- John Dewey and available on Marxist.org:
The Philosopher’s Search for the Immutable, John Dewey, 1929
Thursday, April 11, 2002
II. The Illiteracy Myth
In attempts to solve the problems of low reading scores in the United States, a myriad of programs and methodologies have been applied to "the problem." None of them have shown improvements in reading scores, on the contrary, the more we meddle, the worse the problem becomes.
I didn’t "read" as a child. I could read quite well. I could write. I bluffed my way through high school listening to everything the teachers said in class and writing essays that danced around the topic. I never in my life (not once!), read the textbook or the required reading list (but I aced every test and I graduated with honors).
I couldn’t bring myself to read "a book." I read all the time. I read magazines, cereal boxes, and plays. I had no difficulty reading a play for some reason, even Shakespeare was easy. I could get through the Reader’s Digest (and loved it) because it had short quips. I might never read the main article in a magazine (too long), but I loved reading the letters to the editor, same with the newspaper. All of my required, school book reports were done on books that were also movies. If there was a play based on the book, I’d read the play instead.
I don’t know what it was. I’m sure there’s a label for it today, but I didn’t have the ability to focus long enough to stay with a book. When I was 20, my boss gave me a book for a present. Uh oh. I had to read it, or at least try, if for no other reason than politeness. It was the latest hardback of the popular raggist, Judith Krantz. I read it in two days. I was shocked!
Something had clicked, or rather, something clicked off, that removed my obstacles from reading books. I read every other Krantz book and all the other popular books of that genre for the next six months. Then I realized (duh!) that they all had the same formula and I moved on to more literary (or meaty) material.
For the next 10 years, I read every book I could get my hands on. I still hated the library (something about the environment or the smell), so on my limited budget, I started buying books by the pound. I discovered that paperbacks were all roughly the same price, so it was cost-effective for me to buy the longest books (page count was the main criteria for selecting material).
Unlike most people, I didn’t read The Hobbit until I was 25. I read it, and the Trilogy, in a weekend (not stopping for bothersome things like sleeping).
The Dune series was another favorite. I’d go to the bookstore every month or so to see if there was another coming soon.
I remember thinking I had to make up for lost time. There were SO many books in the world, even if I spent my entire life doing nothing but reading, I’d never make a dent--but I was bent on trying. I felt such a sense of loss for all those years wasted.
When I had my daughter, something clicked again. The postpartum super hearing and super sensitivity stuff, that had made it difficult for me to read as a child, returned. For the seven or eight years after, I couldn’t read. Gradually though, it faded and I’ve been on a hell-bent, non-fiction craze for the last five or more years.
A man I respected once explained to me (an academician and the Dean of a major medical school), during a discussion of the literacy problem in America, his take on reading: that reading was a skill that’s only been important in our culture for the last 150 years, at most, the last 500 years. Before that time, only a very small fraction of people read and never the "common" man. Other skills, such as hunting, trapping, farming, trekking, etc., were much more important and had greater actual and literal value. This remarkable man, who held two (!) PhDs and an MD, had a son who could not read. His son was a severe dyslexic. So much so, that it prevented him from graduating high school. There was certainly no lack of educational focus or an importance placed on education in that home, yet every attempt to help the boy had failed. In the man’s unofficial-research, he discovered that dyslexia was fairly common among boys (much more common than we understand and other types of disabilities as well). That the difficulty with reading, for most boys, go away (like a click), after puberty. But, the years of struggling and ridicule experienced in school, may make it impossible for these folks ever to recover. This man’s son had never recovered emotionally, and thought of himself, as many do, a failure and a dullard.
For a brief while, I was a Literacy of America volunteer. I met some wonderful, intelligent folks who had learned to cope in a reading dependant society--truly, truly amazing stuff. I thought LOAs stats of 1 in 7 or 8 Americans "can’t read" must be an overstatement. If that were true, then one in every eight people I met in life, must not be able to read. That’s couldn’t possibly be true! When I started working with these closeted non-readers, I realized just how well they could cope, and hide this inability. Since I was clued-in to their coping and compensation techniques (my radar was better tuned), I began to notice in my corporate training travels many people who could not read, and many in higher-up type positions. Since these discoveries, I’ve always designed my training programs with hooks and tricks that make it possible (whenever I can) for non-readers to get through it successfully.
My own personal experiences, my unofficial conversations with others, and my general passion with children’s educational issues, leads me to believe that we do more harm than good when we attempt to make children read--when we place too much emphasis on it. It should be left alone. Children should be read to (constantly), books given to them as presents, but no expectations or association with reading as a "school" type activity. The risk is that we potentially destroy a love of learning, a self-discovery of books and genres we are passionate about, and a natural inquisitiveness about the world around us. We should not place age barriers and objective standards in the way of an individual’s educational and literary life journey.
Summation
Schools (public or private), for a vast majority of children, are bad for them, even if they simply put a child at risk of a self-decided failure. Forced or mandated reading programs (and new-fangled reading improvement methodologies) are a scourge on the literary landscape.
Daniel Greenberg, founder of the Sudbury Valley School has his take on this subject: Why Force Reading
