The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, March 24, 2006

It was never about education

In 1888, the [US] 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 Cubberlythe future Dean of Education at Stanfordwrote 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 Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

If true, it would certainly explain the extreme dumbing down of US schools, especially since we no longer really have an industrial base anymore.

Reading the entire article is scary. Very scary, if true. So is the video I linked to above, if only the fact that the stuff that works is being actively ignored by those intrenched in the Educational System.

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