Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling av John Taylor Gatto
John Gatto var en offentlig lærer i New York City i over 30 år, og han har mottatt både prisen for New York City Teacher of the Year (3 ganger!) og New York State Teacher of the Year.
I 1991 skrev han et brev der han annonserte at han sluttet jobben, tittelen var «I Quit, I Think«, der skrev Gatto at han ikke lenger ønsket å «hurt kids to make a living». Brevet ble publisert i Wall Street Journal.
Han har skrevet:
- Dumbing Us Down (1992)
- The Exhausted School (1993)
- A Different Kind of Teacher (2001)
- The Underground History of American Education (2000)
- Weapons of Mass Instruction (2008)
Du finner mange taler, tanker og foredrag av John Taylor Gatto til nedlasting her, og en videopresentasjon her.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
Etter 30 år kom John Gatto fram til den triste konklusjonen at obligatorisk offentlig skole har ingen ting å gjøre med utdanning. Obligatorisk skole lærer bare unge personer å tilpasse seg den økonomiske og sosiale orden. Dumbing Us Down avslører realiteten med dagens skolesystem.
Kapittel 1: The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher
John Taylor Gatto holdt denne talen når han fikk prisen New York State Teacher of the Year i 1991.
I denne talen beskriver Gatto syv lærdommer som blir lært i alle offentlige skoler av alle lærere i Amerika. Last ned og lytt til talen her.
- Confusion. Everything I teach is out of context.
- Class Position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong.
- Indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even thought they want to make it appear that they do.
- Emotional Dependence. I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.
- Intellectual Dependency. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.
- Provisional Selv-Esteem. I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opionoin. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
- One Can’t Hide. I teach student that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by me and my colleagues.
Kapittel 2: The Psychopathic School
Denne talen ble holdt av forfatteren i 1990 da han tok imot prisen New York State Teacher of the Year fra senatet i staten New York. Her følger noen utdrag:
(s21) «Children and old people arepenned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuos present.»
«Schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. … The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.»
«Children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.»
«Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic humal beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.»
Kapittel 4: We need Less School, Not More
Et essay av Gatto. Utdrag følger.
(s 61) «What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those thing take less than a hundred hours to transmit.»
«Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years?»
«A Massachusetts Senator said a while ago that his state had a higher literacy rate before it adopted compulsory schooling than after.»
Kapittel 5: The Congregational Principle
Last ned og lytt her.
«Bertrand Russell remarked that the United States was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided teaching its children to think dialectically.»
(s 89) «American education teaches by its methodology that people are machines.»
«Monopoly schooling has been the chief training institution of the hive society.»
«Education and schooling are, as we all have experienced, mutually exclusive terms.»
«With the addition of television, the destructive power of schooling is now awesome and thoroughly out of control»