15 quotes
Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression and intimidation.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
People learn to read, write and do arithmetic just fine anyway. There are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling—teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, and others—have ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for ‘basic skills’ practice is a smoke screen
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)