WAKE UP AMERICA! - CHAPTER THREE

ARE OUR SCHOOLS CONCENTRATION CAMPUSES FOR MIND DESTRUCTION?

THE MOST VALUABLE INFORMATION

If someone gave you some information which is identical to the information you already have, how much would you value the information given to you. Well, you might put a small value on it because it confirms your knowledge and maybe helps you feel a little more secure. But it is unlikely that you would pay very much for it.

From this it follows that the most valuable information could be the most different from the information you already have.

But there is a problem: New information could be different and useless or different and useful.

Please do not summarily reject information in this book because it is very different from what you now know. Even if you initially have strong objections to some new information, you may find that your objections are satisfactorily answered later.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF "EDUCATIONAL" MIND DESTRUCTION

Much attention has recently been focused on child abuse. In my opinion, by far the worst and most damaging form of child abuse is called "compulsory state education." Personally, I would rather not have a child than subject it to incarceration in a concentration campus for mind destruction.

A report in The Arizona Republic of September 16, 1992 reflects the extent of the mind destruction wreaked by our "educators." A study found that 64 percent of elementary-school teachers say that the health of pupils is declining, while only 5 percent see it as improving. And "92 percent of the teachers listed psychological and emotional difficulties as the most common health problem. Researchers said those resulted mainly from divorce, neglect, low self-esteem and separation of family."

The report didn't say anything about the fact that most of the parents of the pupils had themselves been incarcerated in concentration campuses for mind destruction - most of the teachers had of course suffered the same fate.

The extent of the mind destruction of our youth is also reflected in increased rates of mental illness, suicide, violent crime, and further child abuse.

In their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner report as follows:

"... [T]he number one health problem in the United States is mental illness: there are more Americans suffering from mental illness than from all other forms of illness combined. Of almost equal magnitude is the crime problem. It is advancing rapidly on many fronts, from delinquency among affluent adolescents to frauds perpetrated by some of our richest corporations. Another is the suicide problem. Are you aware that suicide is the second most common cause of death among adolescents? Or how about the problem of 'damaged' children? The most common cause of infant mortality in the United States is parental beating."

THE NATURE OF THE MIND DESTRUCTION

"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."
- Albert Einstein

"Some day, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right, is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness."
- Erik Erikson

Jonathan Kozol is a teacher. In 1967 he wrote Death At An Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, for which he won the National Book Award.

Kozol taught for a year in a Boston school. Two weeks before the end of the year he was fired for reading a poem by a widely-recognized black poet whose work was not part of the compulsory curriculum. Kozol recounts how some teachers spoke of their black students as "animals" and referred to the school as a "zoo." He tells of the many beatings using bamboo whips. He provides extensive details of "pedagogic brainwashing" - for example, children are taught that "true obedience is true liberty." He quotes 15 such slogans.

"Well, that was 25 years ago," you might say, "Things have changed dramatically since." In a recent article (The Arizona Republic, September 3, 1992),columnist Walter Williams wrote, "The education that most kids receive is nothing to write home about; however, that received by black youngsters is criminal... 46 percent of white - and 54 percent of black - Chicago public school teachers have their own children in private schools." Williams also cites statistics that indicate that the more money is spent on education, the worse are the results.

Kozol is also the author of Illiterate America, which claims that one-third of adult Americans are illiterate. Among blacks, 44 percent of adults are illterate. That was in 1985. The situation today is probably even worse.

On April 2, 1992 a letter from a concerned parent appeared in The Arizona Republic under the heading, "What is my son learning in kindergarten? Violence." Some extracts from the letter:
"Guess what my son learned at school this year. He learned aggression. He learned how to tell others: "I'm going to kill you. I'm going to break your arm."

I don't think he should have learned that in kindergarten...

I ate lunch with my son, and I found out the reason he had come home with so many bruises, abrasions and complaints of children abusing him. Another child had forced him to stay in a corner for the whole recess or get beaten up. (The playground teacher didn't see anything.) He was devastated.

Another time, four months after school had begun, he came home so pleased: "Mommy! Guess what! Today was the first time I got to play on the swings." Now it was my turn to be devastated."

John Taylor Gatto is a teacher. Each year from 1989 to 1991 he was named New York City Teacher Of The Year. In 1991 the New York Senate named him State Teacher Of The Year.

Gatto confesses to being "the 7-lesson schoolteacher." These are the seven lessons:

  1. Confusion. Gatto admits that everything he teaches is out of context.
  2. Class position. Children must know their place and stay in the class where they belong. "The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class."
  3. Indifference. "Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class I know of."
  4. Emotional dependency. Gatto says that he teaches children to surrender their will to the chain of command, using "stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces."
  5. Intellectual dependency. The most important lesson. Children must wait for the expert authority to make all the important decisions, to tell them what to study. There is no place for curiosity, only conformity.
  6. Provisional self-esteem. Because it is so difficult to make self-confident spirits conform, children must be taught that their self-respect depends on expert opinion. They must be constantly tested, evaluated, judged, graded, and reported on by certified officials. Self-evaluation is irrelevant - "people must be told what they are worth."
  7. You can't hide. Children are always watched. No privacy. People can't be trusted.

According to Gatto, these are the consequences of the seven lessons:

Gatto says it takes about 100 hours for most children to learn the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic). He also says:
"After years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between children and education I came to believe that government monopoly schools, compulsion and all, are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are abandoned, so no amount of tinkering will correct what is wrong, although the danger is that tinkering can make these places more cosmetic. They are corrupt: like a rotten pear they have lost integrity and cannot be made whole."

John Holt is the author of Instead of Education. He suggests that we learn best from "doing - self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work." He advocates the abolition of "education" - which he describes as "learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear." He says:

"Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts... Whoever takes that right away from us, by trying to 'educate' us, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think...

Education... seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state... My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."

Phyllis Schlafly is author of the book Child Abuse in the Classroom. She writes:
"A remarkable real-life drama took place in seven American cities during March 1984. Hundreds of parents traveled to one of seven locations to testify at U.S. Department of Education Hearings on proposed regulations for the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.

More than 1,300 pages of testimony were recorded by court reporters as parents, public school teachers, and interested citizens spelled out their eye-witness accounts of the psychological abuse of children in the public schools. They related how classroom courses have confused schoolchildren about life, about standards of behavior, about moral choices, about religious loyalties, and about relationships with parents and with peers.

These Hearings explain why we have 23 million adult illiterates who graduated from public schools, and why young people are experiencing high rates of teenage suicide, loneliness, premarital sex, and pregnancies.

These Hearings explain how schools have alienated children from their parents, from traditional morality such as the Ten Commandments, and from our American heritage. These Hearings explain why children are emotionally and morally confused and why, in the apt colloquialism, they need need to "search for their identity."

These Hearings explain what children have been doing in their classrooms instead of learning to read, write, spell, add, subtract, and the essentials of history, geography, and civics. These Hearings explain how children learn in school to be "sexually active," take illegal drugs, repudiate their parents, and rationalize immoral and anti-social conduct when it "feels" good in a particular "situation."

These Hearings speak with the thunderous voice of hundreds of parents who are angry at how their children have been emotionally, morally, and intellectually abused by psychological and behavioral experiments during classroom hours when the parents thought their chidren were being taught basic knowledge and skills. Parents are indignant at the way that educator "change agents," spending federal tax dollars, have used children as guinea pigs for fads and experiments that have been substituted for real learning."

Schlafly draws attention to Senator S.I. Hayakawa's warning in 1978 that U.S. public schools had rejected the notion of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Instead they practiced education as "therapy." Schools had replaced "cognitive education (which addresses the child's intellect, and teaches knowledge and skills) with affective education (which addresses the child's feelings and attitudes, and spends classroom time on psychological games and probing personal questionnaires)." Schlafy continues:

""Therapy" techniques used in the classroom include violent and disturbing books and films; materials dealing with parental conflict, death, drugs, mental illness, despair, and anger; literature that is mostly negative and depressing; requiring the child to engage in the role-playing of death, pregnancy, abortion, divorce, hate, anger and suicide; personal attitude surveys and games (such as Magic Circle) which invade the private thoughts of the child and his family; psychological games which force the child to decide who should be killed (such as the Survival Game); explicit and pornographic instruction in sex acts (legal and illegal, moral and immoral); and a deliberate attempt to make the child reject the values of his parents and his religion...

The originators of "therapy" education began peddling their notions in the 1930s at about the same time that the teaching of reading started its steep decline. This psychological experimentation only existed in spots here and there around the country until 1965 when federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act began to finance curriculum and teacher training for the entire country...

The reader might also wonder, why was there no media coverage of these seven days of Hearings involving intensely controversial issues, dramatic presentations by hundreds of concerned parents, and documented accounts of child abuse in the classroom?

... To our knowledge, there was no television coverage at all and fewer than half a dozen newspaper articles in the entire country. Why the silence about such an important and dramatic event... ?

The testimonies at these Hearings were given by men and women who were, for the most part, total strangers to each other. Yet the message was the same from every part of the country. It came through loud and clear that child abuse in the classroom is a national disease carried to every state by the Typhoid Marys of federal funding."

Stewart Emery is author of the book Actualizations: You Don't Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself. He says:
"In our society, when we talk about raising children, we are really talking about driving them crazy. What education is about is conditioning people to be irresponsible and stupid. It teaches them to be skillful technologists and useless people... At the end of the "educational" process we have become technically semi-competent human machines, and as creative human beings we have turned into morons."

Ayn Rand was a novelist and philosopher, best known for her books, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Among other books, she also wrote The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, with a chapter, "The Comprachicos."

Comprachico is a Spanish word meaning "child-buyer." The comprachicos were a nomadic association, notorious in the seventeenth century. They bought and sold children - special children, children turned into deformed freaks, used in freak shows to amuse the public. At an early age they placed a young child in a porcelain pot with a grotesque form. As the child's body grew, it had to assume the shape of the pot. The result was a deformed freak for people to laugh at.

Rand uses the practice of the comprachicos as an analogy to describe American "education." She refers to our "educators" as "the comprachicos of the mind." Children's minds are forced to assume the shape of a grotesque "intellectual pot." Rand describes the result:

"The students' development is arrested, their minds are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond to to a trainer's whistle, their brains are embalmed in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute for self-esteem... They would obey anyone, they need a master, they need to be told what to do. They are ready now to be used as cannon fodder - to attack, to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed against anyone."

COMPULSORY STATE EDUCATION IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL, COMMUNISTIC, AND CRIMINAL

The U.S. Constitution (Chapter Ten) makes no mention of education. Most of our Founding Fathers took it for granted that education was a private matter. (At the time of the American Revolution, almost certainly, there was a higher rate of literacy than we now have.) The U.S. Constitution says:

In my opinion, compulsory state education violates Amendment Eight, in that it is a "cruel and unusual punishment," and Amendment Thirteen, in that it constitutes "involuntary servitude."

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels advocated ten steps necessary for a communist takeover. Step 10 is "Free education for all children in public schools." Readers interested in further perusing the link between communism and compulsory state education may want to read Is Public Education Necessary? by Samuel L. Blumenfeld. For additional background material, including an annotated bibliography, consult The Twelve Year Sentence edited by William F. Rickenbacker.

Compulsory state education is coercive power at its worst. Innocent children are herded into concentration campuses where they are effectively stripped of individual power. They are brainwashed to be powerless individuals, owned and cared for by omnipotent big-daddy government.

TOWARDS A SOLUTION

Among other books, Paul Goodman wrote Compulsory Miseducation and Growing Up Absurd. He contends that the idea that children can be educated through compulsory state education is a mass superstition:

"When, at a meeting, I offer that perhaps we already have too much formal schooling and that, under present conditions, the more we get the less education we will get, the others look at me oddly and proceed to discuss how to get more money for schools and how to upgrade the schools. I realize suddenly that I am confronting a mass superstition."

Ivan Illich is the author of Deschooling Society. He says that most learning does not occur in school, but happens casually - "Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them." In contrast, he says that, "All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society... The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so." Illich also writes that, "the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization and psychological impotence." Illich advocates that we disestablish schools.

The solution I propose for the individual family is: Don't let your children go anywhere near a government school; send them to a private school; or, better still, teach them at home. In about 100 hours you can teach them the three Rs. Then you show them how to use a library. You may also want to show them how to use a computer. Above all, teach your children how to learn. The Annotated Bibliography at the end of this book provides some references regarding home schooling.

In Chapter Eight I propose the creation of "Human Power Groups" and I suggest that one of their functions could be to organize private, independent schools.

The ultimate solution I propose is complete separation between School and State, and the repeal of all laws regarding education. Compulsory state education is a formula for the collapse of civilization. It must be abolished.

Preface - Contents - Introduction - Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 - Bibliography