=DeeperChalk= Where teachers can tell the truth about Public Ed.

Is the purpose of American Public Education to "dumb us down"?

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An interview with John Taylor Gatto
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Excerpts:
"You can be given—or subjected to—a schooling, but nobody can give you an education except yourself. Education is assembled from the inside out."

"Reflexive obedience is at the heart of the thing. The principal way this is measured is through testing, and most recently through standardized testing. Other vital attributes of a model modern citizen—each necessary to the health of a mass production economy—are an indifferent or poor ability to speak in a public forum or to write cogently (hence rendering all protest ineffective and short-lived) and an inability to think critically (which opens the mind to receptivity to various forms of coercion, like advertising)."

" Consider the short-answer test which requires the commitment to memory of disconnected bits of information. Good, perhaps, for quiz show contestants, but utterly detrimental to the high order thinking skill of reasoning from whole contexts. For most of us, the ability to think like a policy maker has been destroyed upon our emergence from high school."
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Read the whole interview here:

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=372&page=1

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posted by Da Manijment @ 3:18 PM