From John Taylor Gatto’s, The Underground History of American Education,
I’ve yet to meet a parent in public school who ever stopped to calculate the heavy, sometimes lifelong price their children pay for the privilege of being rude and ill-mannered at school. I haven’t met a public school parent yet who was properly suspicious of the state’s endless forgiveness of bad behavior for which the future will be merciless.
I’ll just keep on posting these teasers every now and then until y’all start reading the book. *heh*
Hmmm, maybe I should do the same with this book…
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I have read the book and it is a great book. BUT- quotes such as the one above are unfairly too general. I have always taken upon myself to dicipline my own children and teach them right from wrong – not depending on public or private schools to do that. Parents that do not do this are making huge mistakes.
Also, I do question many things in the system of public schools and have taken my concerns to the county board and board of ed. When I am pushed off I have gone to my local congressman/woman abd senator. Also writing the goverernor helps. So I am quite pro active. I even have been know to go to The Hill (which is why I call my site The Hill Chronicles, lol) to lobby complaints and the like.
Like I said it was a great book but some of the generalizations should have been presented less derogatorily as if all parents are pinheads and no on questions – that is just not so.
Perhaps you have a point, Layla, but notice the “I’ve yet to meet a parent…”
Gatto continually emphasizes that he’s relating personal experience, personal knowledge (although much of that is common knowledge to those of us who’ve followed the real history of public “education”) and personal opinion; he simply asks the reader to validate these things through the reader’s own experience, research and developing opinion.
Yes, there are exceptions to the personally-observed rule Gatto mentions, just as there are exceptions to the rule that principals and other school adminstrators are (usually malicious) idiots. But those exceptioons merely test the rules, not necessarily break them.
I showed the Gatto quote to a teacher (after filtering it through a once-and-nver-again teacher, me) and got a strong gut reaction of veracity.
Do note that the comment by Gatto is most pointedly a comment toward parents who do not question the system that inculcates such rude behavior. (Do note: I view much of the rude behavior inculcated by prisons for kids to be a sane response of young animals resisting brainwashing, but that’s a point for another post.)
Don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the Art Linkletter Show from back in the old b/w television days. He went around visiting schools and interviewing young children. Each time he’d visit a school and come away without having heard the “magic words” he’d add a certain amount of money to a growing jackpot to be awarded to the school which produced the child with the magic words. I can’t recall how long it went on or how much was in the jackpot when one child answered Art’s questions properly by saying, “Yes Sir” or “No Sir” with each response.
That “Yes Sir” or “No Sir” response has not been instilled in our youth; those are magic words which take the individual to a level of civility required to make it in the real world.