I have finished reading John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education," "Weapons of Mass Instruction," and "Dumbing Us Down." and taken time to digest what I've read. I highly recommend these books to anyone with children, grandchildren, interest in education, or if you simply want to know why your education was what it was.
Mr. Gatto is a 30 year veteran of the New York Public School system, teaching in both the best and the worst schools in America. He won Teacher of the Year twice.
When he began teaching, he began studying the history of our educational system, tracing his way back to original documents and quotes. This is what he found out (with some other research I have done along the way):
Everyone who got off the Mayflower in 1621, except very small children, was literate. Before they ever left the boat, they wrote a governing document called "The Mayflower Compact." One law in this document was that every parent would educate their children to be able to read the Bible (Geneva version) and have an occupation. If they didn't they would be charged a heavy fine and lose custody of their kids. This was a harsher sentence than if they beat their kid!
Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," a little booklet that detailed why we should break from England, written some 150 years later, sold 120,000 copies in the colonies totaling 2,500,000 people, or about 1 copy for every 21 people. With an average family size of 7, that's 1 for every 3 households.
The US census recorded a literacy rate of 98% (when you exclude slaves, who it was illegal to educate) in all the years from the first census until the late 1800's. Since England had a rate of 60% at this time, and Germany 50%, this was phenomenal!
Alex De Tocqueville came to America in the early 1800's just to see how in the world we achieved this. He said he could not find 2 people in 1000 who could not read (the King James Bible), and even the lowest workers could figure compound interest in their head. Every house had a Bible and a Euclid's Geometry (in a time with either one would cost a month's salary). (And he concluded that the way we got this level was because our women believed their job as Home Makers/Teachers of their children was the most important in the world).
Noah Webster wrote his "Blue Back Speller" in 1824 so American children would have a book to learn to read with that did not have kings, dukes, and lords in it. He sold 15 million copies by 1837. That's 10,866,020 free people, or more than a copy per person. In a time with no government text book buying, at that. This was mom's and dad's putting their own hands in their own pockets to buy these books whose only purpose was to teach children to read. (I use a revised/updated version to teach my kids to read)
Then we meet Mr. Horace Mann. Mr. Mann was an atheist. His parents were extremely poor, so like the children of other poor people, he was actually educated in a "charity school," a school ran by a church for the purpose of educating children whose parents couldn't do it for whatever reason.
Mr. Mann resented this Christian education and determined it would never happen to another child. He got financial backing from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hunt, Morgan, Penny and other names that are often mentioned with these, to go to Europe to "pick an education system to teach our illiterate population with." (Now, remember, according to the US census, the only true illiterates in the US were slaves, and it was illegal to educate them.) Can we mention that all these men were atheistic socialists (who believed themselves more "evolved" than others, proven by their wealth) and were having trouble getting enough people to leave the independence of their farms to work in factories?
Mr Mann and his wife toured Europe and wrote glowing letters back to America of Germany's educational system (now, remember, England had a higher literacy rate, and America had the highest of all at this time). "Every teacher I saw was smiling! And we did not see 1 unhappy child the whole time we were there!"
(When asked in personal correspondence about this statement his wife wrote, "Yes, he's right. It was summer vacation and all the teachers were lounging on the beach, so they were very happy. And we didn't see one unhappy child because we didn't see any children at all.")
The German system had been formed to produce the best merchant marines in the world (Germany's national industry at the time.) They intentionally did not want the masses literate because literate people are thinking people, and thinking people are too hard to control, don't march in unison. A few select were given superior educations in order to produce competent officers, but the rest were drilled in obedience to human authority. It was this system that produced, (80 years later) a population that did whatever Hitler told them to without question.
This is the system that was imported to America with the first law passed (by the financial incentive of the above named rich) in 1853 in Massachusetts.
It was NOT popular.
Parents refused to send their children to school because they understood this to be a religious grab for their authority, an attempt to re-enslave us to "the elite." When truant officers were sent to enforce the law, the parents fought back...with guns!
Then the Civil War happened.
As part of the punishment to the South, the Northern politicians forced compulsory attendance laws on them with no exceptions, and sent Northern-taught teachers to do the work of teaching. The South responded by using whatever means they could to keep their kids out of school (Northern Indoctrination Centers). This eventually morphed into an anti-education attitude, instead of just an anti-school attitude.
Up until this time, the churches had held out against this atheistic conversion effort. But this is when the Irish Potato Famine happened. Suddenly all those church leaders became alarmed at the number of Irish Catholics flooding into the country. Instead of working to convert the parents, they cut a deal with the atheists to use protestant scriptures and hymns in the government run schools and forced the catholic children into them. The immigrant parents (often illiterate themselves, since Ireland had almost no literacy at this time) simply couldn't fight back.
The Church cut a deal with the devil to deprive parents of their right to raise their own children in order to boost their church numbers without actually having to deal with those "dirty Irish." They sent their protestant kids to school, too, as part of the deal.
Because there were no longer children at home to teach, the women didn't have enough work to do. Coupled with this European (well into atheism by this time) education, they decided to revolt. Thus we get the 1st Feminist Revolution (early 1900's).
History tells us literacy levels began falling as the government took over schooling.
The military has been constantly lowering the academic levels of their entry test.
The SAT and ACT tests to get into college have to revised to be lowered every few years.
TV and newspapers are using increasingly lower literacy levels and vocabularies.
Oh this is all happening very slowly, so it's almost unnoticeable. The only really noticeable drop was after the introduction of Look-Say reading. This method pretty much wiped out literacy in the US (though our official level is 85%, that's actually 85% of high school graduates. True functional literacy is around 50%, with real literacy much lower).
And since the 2nd feminist revolution occurred with the first generation subjected to this method of reading, I think we can easily link these 2. Women felt empty and unimportant, bored, and since they couldn't think (because reading stimulates that muscle and they couldn't read) they were easily manipulated into believing being home was evil (instead of getting mad that their valuable work was taken from them). This left the children to be raised even from birth by government indoctrinated workers instead of loving parents.
So how do we fix our broken schools? We don't. They aren't broken. This is exactly how they were designed to function. They produce a population with just enough literacy to be useful to the rich, but not enough to actually be able to think, who are easily swayed by the media to 1) Consume mindlessly, and 2) obey human authority, changing their opinions as instructed.
The only way to fix our country is to take our children out of government schools and control their education ourselves. Whether this is through private schools or homeschools, we must understand that our mission is NOT to copy the government schools, but to teach thinking, morals, and God.
By the way, when Mr. Gatto finally came to this same conclusion, he quit his job as a teacher. Today he is one of the biggest anti-government school/pro private/homeschool advocates there is.
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