There's an article over on Memory Hole titled The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile (via Cee's ML). The artcle quotes from past publications and specialists in education to show how the American education system was designed specifically to create docile citizens. Here are two nice quotes:
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."and
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."but the one that struck a cord in me was the last quote:
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 orthey will lose their jobs in the real world."
I'm not a very bright 8 year old (or a very bright 23 year old, for that matter) but I did spend the last 7 years of my K12 education in a school that wasn't a public school, which tried relatively hard to keep students engaged, and allowed us to stimulate ourselves in areas that interested us (for me is was programming and theatre tech). Perhaps as a result of that, I never picked up the art of doing the same thing 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, 30 years in a row. I might never stick with the same job for more than a few years, and I might never be rich, but somehow, I don't feel I'm worse off because of that... Maybe society (read: the state) has more to lose from individuals, than individuals stand to lose from society.
Posted Thu, July 17, 2003 15:25 by dirvish
I have always gotten the impression that Japanese schools/culture stresses a similar type of conditioning. Do you think this is true? In which country is the conditioning more extreme?
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