The Failure of Modern Public Education

THE PSYCHOPATHIC SCHOOL

John Taylor Gatto

He came to the conclusion that the government education system is broken, unfixable, and he was quitting.  He then wrote the book, The Underground History of American Education, a classic on the tragedy happening in American education.  He documents the takeover by socialist, centralized-government people who were not interested in honest education, but in mind-control.  (On that subject, see also two books by Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary?   and   NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education

link

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.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.

Here is another curiosity to think about. 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 children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.
===============
Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

• Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self. 
• According to recent reports children watch 55 hours of television a week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.
• My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours.  

• During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. 

• That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours per week.

It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice.

But these activities are just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons have a lot to do with it.

Get The Book!

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto
For Gatto's superb The Underground History of American Education, call The Odysseus Group, in NYC, 212 529-9397.
Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson.

©Gene Zimmer 1999 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

===================================================================

Walking Targets

By B. K. Eakman

View this Author's Spotlight

eBook (PDF), 301 Pages 

     This item has not been rated yet

Preview

Price: $7.95

America gave up the three R's and got back the three I's: ignorance, illiteracy, and illegitimacy.

Parents of the postwar years wanted a “kinder and gentler nation.” Americans were vulnerable to the arguments of behavioral psychologists. These came at them through articles and books touting appealing but unworkable philosophies of child management that denounced adult guidance and leadership. These messages were later repeated through colleges of education in the form of courses in "educational psychology.''

Today’s schools promote success without achievement, ethics without religion, and character without morals. Clinical-sounding labels such as “emotionally handicapped” may make failure more palatable. They certainly make it more permanent.

"As you may be aware, data-mining is presented to the public as strictly for security purposes.  Not exactly:  These screening instruments, which I first exposed as “psychographics,” are calculated to predict attitudes through invasive surveys and questionnaires masquerading as “tests” and, if possible, to modify opinions early on via left-wing school curriculum, “enrichment” activities and textbooks.

  

"In 2003, the Education Department, among others, continued to deny that it was collecting, sharing and storing psychological (“politically sensitive”) data on schoolchildren and families.  Today, federal agencies actually brag about their data-collection activities — the same psychological evaluations and lesson plans I described in my 1998 book. With new legislation recently passed, there is nothing now to stop these assessments of political correctness, under the cover of "mental health," from landing on the desktops of company executives, law enforcement agencies or university admissions officers. This gives new meaning to the term "career screening," and it can prevent your child, whatever his or her grades, from aspiring to a position of leadership or influence."

"For the past decade students have had to plow through not only quasi-tests called "assessments," featuring all sorts of questions about their parents and home life, but a multitude of intimate and personal surveys, nearly all of them computerized, as part of their class work. Where do you think newspapers get statistics like "12% of students say they have had intercourse by age 15," or smoked a joint in the last 6 months, or dislike their parents?

"But, of course, these responses are anonymous, you say.

"Dream on. Surreptitious "slugging," "bar-coding," "sticky-labeling," and "embedding identifiers": All these techniques, and more, are described at length in the testing contracts and literature, should anyone bother to read them.

"Children have always been the consummate sources of data, notoriously undiscerning about the kinds of information they disclose. Like all computerized facts and figures, youngsters' responses can be cross-matched with everything from medical and health insurance records to credit card transactions. But no legislation or guidelines have emerged from our hallowed regulative bodies to sufficiently put the brakes on the tremendous upswing of such activity over the past two decades. The 80s and 90s were spent largely in denial. If anything, our leaders made it worse by swallowing malarkey about the supposed benefits of mental health profiling, personality inventories and behavioral screening - to identify potential troublemakers and ensure public safety. Society's reward? More Columbine-like atrocities - and a near-perfect political weapon, now neatly in place."
==========================================================================

Protect yourself and use secure communications with Pink Pagoda service.

Salon article on tuition inflation...

Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media

Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping

THOMAS FRANK

link

The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at....

==========================================
Education and entertainment have become the same thing. It is quite an amazing racket. After WWII the GI Bill allowed so many to attend college (if qualified) that the colleges got way greedy and decided that everyone should be qualified. College became essential to get the most menial of entry level jobs. No one ever worked their way up from an unskilled entry level clerkship any more. Once the government (that's the taxpayer involuntarily) guaranteed student loans for totally uncreditworthy student wannabes, universities went hog wild inventing the most frivolous, most vocational, most bureaucrat "easy-A" courses and degree majors passing strange. Employers drank the Kool-Aid and hired M.A.s in Human Resources who, knowing nothing about the skills or substance involved in the work, required degrees to verify "teachability," "tenacity," and "servility." That put millions of intelligent, innovative, and extremely talented new workers out of the running for jobs with a future. Meanwhile unions were pricing themselves out of the game and fostering a culture of go along to get along and no one could stand out as a high performer. You got lots of students studying to become network anchors, motion picture actors, artists, filmmakers, diplomats, explorers, theater critics, magazine editors, professional athletes, Marxist professors, lawyers. Real workers like firemen, police officers, air traffic controllers, sound, lighting, and broadcast technicians, investigative journalists, sports writers, worker bees in offices and retail, heating ventilating and air conditioning and building engineers, constructors, craftsmen, engravers, mechanics never got to see a college classroom unless they wee sent for "gay, feminist, racial, cultural sensitivity" training. And yet they need tens of thousands of professors and teachers instead of a menu of no more than ten great teachers in each subject available electronically to every student and objective mulitiple choice examinations that an be completed anywhere, all at super low cost. The IT Revolution, the Internet productivity effect, and AlGore have done nothing to modernize pedagogy at all!

Confident Idiots

link

Dunning–Kruger effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Psychology
Outline History Subfields
Basic typesThe Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias which can manifest in one of two ways:

• Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.^[1]
• Those persons to whom a skill or set of skills come easily may find themselves with weak self-confidence, as they may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. See Impostor syndrome.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".^[2]

The phenomenon was first tested in a series of experiments published in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the Department of Psychology, Cornell University.^[2][3] The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras.^[4] They noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill.^[5]

Dunning has since drawn an analogy ("the anosognosia of everyday life")^[1][6] with a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.

If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. […] the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

—David Dunning^[7]

Supporting studies[edit]

Dunning and Kruger set out to test these hypotheses on Cornell undergraduates in psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined the subjects' self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank: the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated theirs. As Dunning and Kruger noted:

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.^[2]

Meanwhile, people with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.^[2]

A follow-up study, reported in the same paper, suggests that grossly incompetent students improved their ability to estimate their rank after minimal tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked, regardless of the negligible improvement in actual skills.^[2]

In 2003, Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger, also of Cornell University, published a study that detailed a shift in people's views of themselves when influenced by external cues. Participants in the study, Cornell University undergraduates, were given tests of their knowledge of geography, some intended to affect their self-views positively, some negatively. They were then asked to rate their performance, and those given the positive tests reported significantly better performance than those given the negative.^[8]

Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were.^[9]

Research conducted by Burson et al (2006) set out to test one of the core hypotheses put forth by Kruger and Muller in their paper "Unskilled, unaware, or both? The better-than-average heuristic and statistical regression predict errors in estimates of own performance," "that people at all performance levels are equally poor at estimating their relative performance."^[10] In order to test this hypothesis, the authors investigate three different studies, which all manipulated the "perceived difficulty of the tasks and hence participants’ beliefs about their relative standing."^[11] The authors found that when researchers presented subjects with moderately difficult tasks that the best and the worst performers actually varied little in their ability to accurately predict their performance. Additionally, they found that with more difficult tasks, the best performers are less accurate in predicting their performance than the worst performers. The authors conclude that these findings suggest that "judges at all skill levels are subject to similar degrees of error."^[12]

Ehrlinger et al. (2008) made an attempt to test alternative explanations, but came to qualitatively similar conclusions to the original work. The paper concludes that the root cause is that, in contrast to high performers, "poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve."^[13]

Studies on the Dunning–Kruger effect tend to focus on American test subjects. A study on some East Asian subjects suggested that something like the opposite of the Dunning–Kruger effect may operate on self-assessment and motivation to improve.^[14] East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and get along with others.

Awards[edit]

Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 satirical Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for their paper, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".^[15]

Historical references[edit]

Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, Dunning and Kruger have noted similar historical observations from philosophers and scientists, including Confucius ("Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."),^[3] Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision", seeWikiquote),^[13] and Charles Darwin, whom they quoted in their original paper ("ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge").^[2]

Geraint Fuller, commenting on the paper, noted that Shakespeare expressed similar sentiment in As You Like It ("The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole." (V.i)).^[16]

KWANZAA

link

KWANZAA: HOLIDAY BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE FBI

Ann Coulter ridicules invention marked 'exclusively by idiot white liberals'

Published: 10 hours ago

by ANN COULTER Email | Archive

 Receive author alerts  Subscribe to feed

Ann Coulter, well-known for her TV appearances as a political analyst, is an attorney and author. Her latest book is "Demonic."More ↓

• 
• Text smaller
• Text bigger

Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year? And let’s face it, Kwanzaa’s gotten way too commercialized.

A few years ago, I suspended my annual Kwanzaa column because my triumph over this fake holiday seemed complete. The only people still celebrating Kwanzaa were presidential-statement writers and white female public school teachers.

But it seems to be creeping back. A few weeks ago, House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., complained about having to stick around Washington for fiscal cliff negotiations by accusing Republicans of not caring about “families” coming together to bond during Kwanzaa. The private schools have picked up this PC nonsense from the public schools. (Soon, no one will know anything.)

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga – aka Dr. Maulana Karenga – founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.

In what was ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution (although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers). Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves.

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” are currently in prison?)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” – and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear.

Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included: “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. “was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt” – an interesting standard of proof.)

In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, “Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents.”

Now we know that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot to death two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus: Al “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time, a useful steppingstone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Karenga’s invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming legacy of the Worst Generation.

In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani – the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa praises collectivism in every possible area of life – economics, work, personality, even litter removal. (“Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.”) It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially said that, under Kawaida, we also hate whites. (Kawaida, Kwanzaa and Kuumba are also the only three Kardashian sisters not to have their own shows on the E! network.)

While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” – excluding, one hopes, the forced abortions, imprisonment of homosexuals and forced labor – Karenga said Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.” There’s an inclusive philosophy for you.

Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves – the violence, the Marxism, the insanity.

Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, they have forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI’s COINTELPRO. It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black people celebrate Christmas. (Merry Christmas, fellow Christians!)

Sing to “Jingle Bells”:

Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!

Attention: Sports Fans

Football Wisdom

Florida's Will Muschamp on one of his players: "He doesn't know the meaning of the word fear. In fact, I just saw his grades and he doesn't know the meaning of a lot of words."  ___________________________________________  Why do Tennessee fans wear orange?  So they can dress that way for the game on Saturday, go hunting on Sunday and pick up trash on Monday.  ___________________________________________  What does the average Alabama player get on his SATs?  Drool.  ___________________________________________  How many Ohio State freshmen football players does it take to change a light bulb?  None. That's a sophomore course.  ___________________________________________  What do you say to a University of Miami Hurricane football player dressed in a three-piece suit? "  "Will the defendant please rise."  ___________________________________________  If three Louisiana football players are in the same car, who is driving?  The police officer.  ___________________________________________  How can you tell if an Auburn football player has a girlfriend?  There's tobacco juice on both sides of the pickup truck.  ___________________________________________  What do you get when you put 32 Arkansas cheerleaders in one room?  A full set of teeth.  ___________________________________________  UCLA Coach Jim Mora is only going to dress half of his players for the game this week; the other half will have to dress themselves.  ___________________________________________  How is the Indiana football team like an opossum?  They play dead at home and get killed on the road.  ___________________________________________  Why did the Nebraska linebacker steal a police car?  He saw "911" on the side and thought it was a Porsche.  ___________________________________________  How do you get a former Illinois football player off your porch?  Pay him for the pizza.  ___________________________________________  What are the longest three years of a Clemson football player's life?  Freshman I, Freshman II, and Freshman III.