Learn in Freedom

[Kat Kanning]

Oh, what was your handout?  Is it something we could use in Keene also?

[AlanM]

Earlier in this thread. At the bottom of page 4.

[Kat Kanning]

Oh yes   You don't mind if we hand it out also?  I would change one thing, though.  The wiki page is too long to type in:

Learn in Freedom



As more and more money is spent on Public Schools
The Curriculum gets progressively dumbed down.


This Is No Accident!
It is Planned!


    Public Schools are warehouses, not oasis? of learning. The goal of Public Schools is to give you a minimal education, not a meaningful one. Most teachers try desperately to teach their students, but are prevented from doing so by a system that is designed to thwart their efforts.

   Don?t want to believe it? Those who do believe it are taking their children out of Public Schools and into private schools, or are home schooling their children. Why do you think most elitist parents send their children to private schools? Because they want their children to receive a REAL education.

   For more information on the design of Public Education, please read John Taylor Gatto?s book ?Underground History of American Education?. It can be read (or ordered) on-line at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com  John Taylor Gatto was teacher of the Year in New York state, and spent many years researching education in America. Having once read it, you will never view American Public Schools in the same way again.

   What are the alternatives? They are many, and varied. For more information, go to:
http://nhfree.com and click on "Escape the Public Schools"

   You can also help others escape the Public School morass by making a Donation to the Liberty Scholarship Fund, a fund created to help children escape the public schools either by attending the Private School of their choice, or by learning at home. Visit the Liberty Scholarship website at: http://www.lsfund.org


   You are invited to join the discussion forum at the NH Underground :
http://www.nhfree.com

[Russell Kanning]

I bet they wouldn't actually arrest you. ?
I have found the table-and-signs idea to work well. People can see us, but we aren't in the way and they ask us for literature.

[AlanM]

Oh yes ? You don't mind if we hand it out also?? I would change one thing, though.? The wiki page is too long to type in:

Learn in Freedom



As more and more money is spent on Public Schools
The Curriculum gets progressively dumbed down.


This Is No Accident!
It is Planned!


? ? Public Schools are warehouses, not oases of learning. The goal of Public Schools is to give you a minimal education, not a meaningful one. Most teachers try desperately to teach their students, but are prevented from doing so by a system that is designed to thwart their efforts.

? ?Don?t want to believe it? Those who do believe it are taking their children out of Public Schools and into private schools, or are home schooling their children. Why do you think most elitist parents send their children to private schools? Because they want their children to receive a REAL education.

? ?For more information on the design of Public Education, please read John Taylor Gatto?s book ?Underground History of American Education?. It can be read (or ordered) on-line at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com? John Taylor Gatto was teacher of the Year in New York state, and spent many years researching education in America. Having once read it, you will never view American Public Schools in the same way again.

? ?What are the alternatives? They are many, and varied. For more information, go to:
http://nhfree.com and click on "Escape the Public Schools"

? ?You can also help others escape the Public School morass by making a Donation to the Liberty Scholarship Fund, a fund created to help children escape the public schools either by attending the Private School of their choice, or by learning at home. Visit the Liberty Scholarship website at: http://www.lsfund.org


? ?You are invited to join the discussion forum at the NH Underground :
http://www.nhfree.com

Kat,
By all means! Good change. ?
I edited the oasis' to oases in the above as Mike suggested. ?

[AlanM]

This from: "the keynote address to the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar in Boulder, Colorado, delivered by Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce. This quote appears to have been edited out of printed transcripts of the talk, but was reported by newspapers in actual attendance:

Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It?s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well?by creating the international child of the future."

This is what we are up against folks.

[Russell Kanning]

 

[AlanM]

From John Taylor Gatto's "Underground History of American Education":

Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren?t aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.

A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men?but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.

[Dreepa]

Alan just ordered one of Gatto's books from the Library... Believe it or not 10 other people want it too. There is a waiting list. Maybe there are 20K other folks like us?

Hopefully I will get if before I leave CA, otherwise I will read in in NH.

[AlanM]

Great Dreepa!  I found his book answered a lot of vague questions I was wrestling with. I have a clearer picture of what must be done. I can eliminate some of the potentially wasted effort I might have used.

[AlanM]

More from Gatto's Underground History of American Education

A Billion, Six For KC

What are the prospects of reclaiming systematic schooling so it serves the general welfare? Surely the possibility of recharging the system when so many seem to desire such a course would be the best refutation of my buried thesis?that no trustworthy change is possible, that the school machine must be shattered into a hundred thousand parts before the pledges made in the founding documents of this country have a chance to be honored again. No one serves better as an emblem of the hopelessness of a gradual course of school reform or one that follows the dictates of conventional wisdom than Judge Russell G. Clark, of Kansas City, Missouri.

For more than ten years Judge Clark oversaw the spending of a $1.6 billion windfall in an attempt to desegregate Kansas City schools and raise the reading and math scores of poor kids. I arbitrarily select his story from many which might be told to show how unlikely it is that the forces which gave us our present schools are likely to vanish, even in the face of outraged determination. Or that models of a better way to do things are likely to solve the problem, either.

Judge Russell G. Clark took over the Kansas City school district in 1984 after adjudicating a case in which the NAACP acted for plaintiffs in a suit against the school district. Although he began the long court proceedings as a former farm boy raised in the Ozarks without an activist judicial record, Clark?s decision was favorable to the desegregationists beyond any reasonable expectation. Clark invited those bringing the suit to dream up perfect schools and he would get money to pay for them! Using the exceptional power granted federal judges, he unilaterally ordered the doubling of city property taxes.4 When that provided inadequate revenue, he ordered the state to make up the difference. How?s that for decisive, no-nonsense support for school reform as a social priority?

Suddenly the district was awash in money for TV studios, swimming pools, planetariums, zoos, computers, squadrons of teachers and specialists. "They had as much money as any school district will ever get," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who directed a postmortem analysis, "It didn?t do very much." Orfield was wrong. The Windfall produced striking results:

Average daily attendance went down, the dropout rate went up, the black-white achievement gap remained stationary, and the district was as segregated after ten years of well-funded reform as it had been at the beginning. A former school board president whose children had been plaintiffs in the original suit leading to Judge Clark?s takeover said she had "truly believed if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that would make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see dramatic results educationally." Who is the villain in this tale? Judge Clark is. He just doesn?t get it. The system isn?t broken. It works as intended, turning out incomplete people. No repair can fix it, nor is the education kids need in any catalogue to buy. As Kansas City proves, giving schools more money only encourages them to intensify the destructive operations they already perform.

[Rocketman]

I've got all Gatto's books, and I've read Dumbing us Down and Different Kind of Teacher over and over again.

Also, in my college composition classes, the first thing they have to do is read a few Gatto essays.? ?? Ah, the joys of classroom contrarianism.? ?

[AlanM]

Great news Rocketman! 

[AlanM]

Rocketman,
What is your schedule for moving to NH?
Are you interested in planning an alternative school, based on freedom?

[Kat Kanning]

Dreepa, John Taylor Gatto is a hero among homeschoolers.  I bet you'd have a hard time finding a homeschooler who hasn't read something of his, and I bet most have heard him speak at homeschooler events.  It doesn't surprise me there's a queue for his books.